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I don't know if I covered what "estimated shipments" are but I don't want to confuse anyone any further.
Since today is my day off, I have limited access at home to Global Connect or i would post a screen shot now (don't know why it doesn't work at home).
It all has to do with when you do your consensus (opens tomorrow).
Based upon your earned allocation, you get estimated shipments of a particular allocation group. For the purpose of explanation, I will use Camaro (obviously). Let's assume that Camaro was in full fledged production (for fantasy's sake). When I do my consensus, I would forecast how many Camaros I would sell for the next 3 months. So let's be fair and say the dealership is going to sell 10 Camaros in a month for the next 3. That totals a forecast of 30 units. Then it asks how many Camaros I would like on the ground on the 4th month. So let's say I want to have 20 Camaros in stock to sell. Now I have to figure out how many preliminary orders I have to pull from. So, if I plan to sell 30 and then have 20 on the ground, I need to have 50 buildable orders to satisfy those quantities. That's where the estimated shipments come in. If I only have 20 estimated shipments, I really shouldn't be forecasting for those numbers because the most I'm going to get (plus or minus 10%) is 20. But there are dealers that either, don't take all their estimated shipments OR just don't use the system right and lose allocation and estomated shioments fto other dealers.
This is why GM has issues keeping factories running at full capacity. Let's say I had 15 HD Crew Cabs in stock and somehow sold them all in one month. GM would give me estimated shipments because I am selling them well. But if I want out of the HD Crew Cab business, I don't take my est. shipments and another dealer can pick them up.
Using the Camaro during a launch is a bad example because you can't fathom these numbers. As I said before, it really is not complicated when you do it for years but chances are your dealer has a guy who really is not familiar with the system at all.
That's why you always see "Your dealer is an *****!"
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