Toronto, Ontario — The Ontario Automotive Recyclers Association (OARA) held the third instalment of its Spring Webinar Training Series last week, featuring Chad Counselman and Betsy Finnell of the Einstein Pricing tool: an automated software that adjusts your part prices within your YMS on a daily basis, making adjustments for age, quantity on hand, close-ratio, sales volume, sales velocity, year of fitment, miles, grade, and other outside forces that drive prices.
The tool was originally developed in-house at Counselman Auto Recycling, a third-generation recycler formerly owned by Counselman. Around 2015 or 2016, he realized the need to automate the process of keeping his prices up to date–and thus the Einstein Pricing tool was born.
“We’re seeing radical price swings in today’s current market conditions,” said Counselman. “So many recyclers are unable to keep their systems up to date with the current price swings. They’re actually selling parts at a price that may be too low and losing the opportunity to capitalize; to have the cash to go and buy replacement vehicles.”
Counselman explained that the Einstein Pricing tool looks at supply and demand forces in your YMS–Checkmate, Powerlink or Pinnacle–as well as quantity on hand, sales ratios, activities and much more to make determinations on a particular interchange number part’s suggested price. It then allows for price adjustments based on a specific part’s characteristics–whether it be age, mileage, damage, year of fitment, et cetera.
“[The tool] has customizable settings that allow you as the user to set up the system to perform in the way you want it to perform. Someone recently asked me how many settings we had–I’d say we have about 12,000 settings with the new update. We have about 20 settings per part type, and you can control down to very granular settings.”
“It’s designed to take whatever pricing philosophy each recycler has and enable you to replicate and automate it,” said Finnell. “The goal is to free you up from the time you spend [pricing] while still ensuring your parts are spot-on with your current market demand. We use it in small yards, large yards–it’s tailored for any size yard.”
Counselman then shared his screen to demonstrate the tool and its features.
The system allows users to key in part types they may want to adjust prices on. It then pulls your inventory and displays pricing data on the screen.
“By this example, there are 815 transmissions that could be repriced; it’s giving a current price, a recommended price and a standard price.”
The system also features five different dropdown menus to adjust prices on specific parts as per your selected qualities.
Finnell then explained some of the additional personalization features.
“You can determine the frequency–you can update prices nightly; existing inventory prices nightly and freshly-added inventory prices monthly. You can set the initial price or the tool can set the initial price. You can even set the initial price, but if that price is scheduled to increase in the next 90 days [tell the tool] to increase the price.
“We are also in the process of creating backorder data. Once we get that up to go, the system will update any parts that are on backorder and allow you to identify any parts on backorder and let you set prices at a percentage of MSRP. You’ll be able to keep that part on that backorder-reflected rate until the part goes off backorder, at which point the system will know and revert it back to pre-backorder price,” she explained.
Users also have the ability to add an as-is hourly damage rate so you may discount parts based on half-units or a sliding scale.
One of the program’s newest features includes a custom pricing tool.
“In situations where you have prices dialled in right where you want them, but you’re not happy with the price on certain parts. In those cases, you can type in whatever you want as custom price and the system will honour that price.”
Einstein Pricing is the first tool in the Einstein package to launch, but Counselman said there are more programs on the way, to hit the market as soon as autumn 2022.
