Chad Counselman, owner of consulting company – Wise Counsel Group LLC, and Einstein Tools, a software business based in the US, tells us more about the development of Einstein Pricing and the benefits it can bring to the automotive recycling industry.
Einstein Pricing is an automated software solution that is offered by Recyclers Executive Services Corporation, a sister company to Hotlines. At this time, the product is only offered to recyclers in North America. The tool is designed to read data from the recycler’s inventory management system (IMS), analyze the appropriate data, calculate prices for each part in stock, and write the new prices back into the IMS – and do all this every day. The tool reviews QOH, Sales Volume, Sales Velocity, Number of Lookups, Close Ratios, Miles, Grade, Age, Year of Fitment, and outside market forces on every part every day. It only updates prices in the IMS if the price needs to be changed.
Now that you know what Einstein Pricing is, how was it developed? I was a salvage yard owner, and in 2017, I just simply could not keep up with pricing parts while also trying to grow the facility. With more and more vehicles arriving every week, I simply could not devote the time needed to review the prices of every freshly-added vehicle. I decided to hire a full-time programmer to help develop a software tool that would automate repricing parts. After about a year of coding and tweaking, a very early version of what is now Einstein Pricing was developed. The tool did what I needed. It reviewed part prices daily and adjusted them as necessary to keep them within market conditions. After seeing remarkable growth in the business, I sold the multi-site operation in 2019 but kept the software.
In 2021, I partnered with Betsy Finnell of Hotlines to create a new company, Recyclers Executive Services Corporation, to continue the development of the pricing tool and offer it to the market under the name Einstein Pricing. After a couple of months of adapting the pricing software to work remotely from the web and work with all three major inventory management systems in the US, Einstein Pricing was released to the market on October 1, 2021.
Since its release, many recyclers have rapidly adopted Einstein Pricing across North America. Although the tool pleased many recyclers in its original state, a few recyclers started asking for enhancements. Many of those requested enhancements were great ideas, and in a fashion similar to Hotlines, the programmers went to work tweaking the software to make it better and better. After roughly 35 enhancements, the most analytical recyclers are now pleased with how the tool works and use it to keep their prices accurate.
As the enhancements to Einstein Pricing are now slowing down, the team is now starting to code on Einstein Profits. Einstein Profits is another derivative of a tool that I developed to help my operation generate higher profits on brokered parts.
The new tool is expected to roll out in early spring. Look for it to be released at the URG Conference in April.
For further information, please email Chad at Chad@WiseCounselGroup.com
