It’s time to get ready to serve your shop customers during the busy tire changeover season.

While every auto parts jobber should be ensuring that their customer shops have their own stock of tire service items, it’s inevitable that they’ll occasionally come up short.

An effective strategy will involve more than just the delivery drivers; having the right products in the right places in your stock room and shipping areas is key to effective and efficient service during these times.

Here are some tips of how to make sure you’re ready to deliver over-the-top service that makes life a lot easier for your customers.

• Make sure you’re well stocked with high service items for the winter season. This can be everything from wheel end service items like bearings, exhaust clamps, hangars other items that will be needed to repair exhaust systems that run afoul of deep snow.
• Make sure you have a good stock wheel nuts and bolts for a variety of vehicles. These do have a habit of disappearing in the heat of the moment as techs are trying to pound tires as quickly as possible. Consider having some of these actually on hand within the delivery vehicles.
• Ensure that you have a good supply of impact guns on hand; it’s inevitable that some will suffer breakdowns during this heavy-usage period.
• Have TPMS sensors in stock.
• Have lock nut removal kits in stock.
• Make sure you have ample supplies of chemicals, wheel weights and other products used in tire mounting and balancing.
• If you stock tire service equipment, ensure that at least one is staged and ready to be delivered should a customer shop suffer a breakdown. Being able to get them a replacement in minutes as opposed to hours or days is a great selling advantage.

Do your best to ensure that these items and other incidentals that are in high demand during tire changeovers (popular tire sizes and winter wheels if you sell them) are pre-staged in your delivery area in keeping with the demand levels that will rise.

Saving a few minutes with each delivery will really benefit shops and your operation.

For delivery drivers, the mission is largely to be aware of what the shops your delivery to have on hand. Every delivery, ask them if they need any wheel service supplies.

They may feel they’re in good shape one day, but a dozen cars later suddenly realize they’re going to come up short.

Ensuring that you can help them avoid any interruptions is a great benefit to the shop and to the team you work for.