Maintaining an efficient workflow is crucial to the success of any auto repair shop. A breakdown in workflow can lead to delays, a frustrated team, and unsatisfied customers. One key area where workflow can break down is during the inspection and estimate process.
By investing in a more modern, cloud-based shop management system, you can establish a transparent, replicable digital vehicle inspection and repair estimate process, and streamline parts ordering so that service advisors can dispatch repair orders quickly to technicians.
Simplify Your Shop's Workflow
Once the service advisor has entered the relevant customer notes into your shop management platform, the guest needs to know what’s actually wrong with their vehicle so they can decide what work needs to be done.
At this stage, service advisors can use digital vehicle inspections (DVIs) to give customers a visual of exactly what’s wrong with their car.
DVIs help build trust with customers because they add an additional layer of transparency. Guests can see with their own eyes that the repairs listed are necessary. DVIs also make your shop more efficient because technicians and service advisors will be able to work with the same information and collaborate in one place.
Once the technician has finished their inspection and creates a DVI, the service advisor can put together a repair estimate to send along with or after the DVI. That repair estimate should break down each repair so the guest can see exactly what works need to be done, and the urgency of the work.
Modern shop management tools streamline the creation of DVIs and repair estimates. Technicians and service advisors can collaborate in real-time to create accurate, easy-to-understand inspection reports and estimates, and service advisor can dispatch a technician to run a DVI in real-time.
The technician can then go through a pre-set list of tasks for different types of inspections.
Tighten Up Your Shop’s Parts Ordering Process
Once the guest has approved specific jobs, the service advisor should know exactly which parts to order (if they aren’t already in the shop’s stock or inventory).
Your shop’s service advisors should be able to quickly and easily shop around for parts, place orders, and keep technicians in the loop about when the parts have arrived. As for parts reconciliation, a comprehensive auto repair shop management platform should automatically keep track of purchase orders and play nice with your accounting software.
Shop management software can further simplify parts ordering by integrating with major parts vendors, enabling service advisors to place orders with just a few clicks. If the service advisor calls up the local parts dealer instead, they can place an order and make note of it within individual repair orders.
The service advisor can add additional notes, such as who the point of contact is at the local dealer and what number to call if needed.
With a comprehensive shop management system, service advisors can indicate each stage of the parts ordering process—needed, quoted, ordered, and received. Additionally, the software should automatically keep track of parts ordering details.
Quickly Dispatch Tickets to Technicians
The service advisor has gathered all the customer information, the customer has approved the repair estimate, and the parts are at the shop. Now, it’s time for the fun part—starting the actual repair! But it’s important that technicians are set up for success.
The service advisor needs to get a quick snapshot of what each technician is working on and what’s in their repair pipeline, and then quickly dispatch repair orders to an available tech. The service advisor should be able to do this from behind their desk, rather than having to go find individual technicians and ask them questions about their workload.
Shop management tools can give service advisors a bird’s eye view of each technician’s workload from their workstation. Service advisors should be able to go into the software and see a list of outstanding repair orders.
From there, the service advisor can dispatch a repair order to the appropriate technician. If it’s more efficient, they can dispatch individual line items from a repair order to different technicians in order to distribute work more evenly.
Work Smarter with the Right Tools for the Job
Using a comprehensive shop management software like Tekmetric can help streamline the process of creating DVIs and repair estimates, simplify parts ordering, and dispatch tickets to technicians.
See why thousands of auto repair shops rely on Tekmetric.
With a complete view of how all your shops are performing and access to the tools needed to make changes quickly, shop management systems help run your shop with smooth and agile business operations, provide a consistent experience for customers, and ultimately maximize revenue and support your shop's growth.
Features such as unified reporting across all your shops and shared customer history work to create seamless processes for managing your business as a centralized organization.
Tekmerchant now includes the industry’sfirst “buy now, pay later” feature, allowing customers to complete vehicle repairs and pay over time with no risk to your shop!
The Tekmerchant platform offers flexible, forward thinking solutions that allow shops to save time and effort when managing funds and customer payments.
Shop owners can share invoices and accept payments via text and email, enabling the customer to pay directly from their smartphone and pick up the vehicle when it is convenient for them.
Additionally, customers can leverage Tekmerchant’s “buy now, pay later” feature using Affirm and Klarna. This is an industry-first solution that is familiar to customers who use it in other industries.
Concurrently, Tekmerchant improves shop owner accounting processes by automatically integrating all partial and complete payments into the point-of-sale.
This feature, added by popular request from shop owners, integrates with Tekmetric’s existing payments reports for real-time tracking and reporting.
Remember spring and summer of 2020? A lot of us are probably trying to forget and move forward, and we feel you. It was a scary time period for everyone, including the automotive repair industry.
Last April, auto shop owners were wondering, are my customers going to come into the shop? If people stay inside, are they going to drive less? If they drive less, are they still going to come into the shop as frequently? What if other industries are affected, and people have less money for repairs?
We were nervous like everyone else. But anyone who knows Tekmetric knows that we’re committed to driving the auto repair industry forward; we wanted to answer these questions and put Auto Repair Professionals’ minds at ease.
We also wanted to enable shops to not only endure the pandemic but also grow and come out stronger than ever before.
Strength in Numbers
If there’s one thing that makes us feel confident, empowered, and like we know what’s going on, it’s numbers. (Tracking shop performance and providing insights is kind of our thing).
We’ve seen the power of metrics in shops across America, and we know that customers, service advisors, technicians, and the entire auto repair industry benefit when auto shop owners can make informed decisions.
So we launched the TM-500 Index. The TM-500 tracks the Average Repair Order and Car Count of five hundred auto repair shops located across the United States. But data don’t mean squat if it ain’t easy to read. The TM-500 let’s users sort data by time and region so they can quickly explore trends.
Want to know the ARO and Car Count between the months of June and November of 2020? Simply set the time period “by month,” and the TM-500 will generate an easy-to-read graph.
Want to know if shops in midwest states had a higher or lower Car Count than southwest states last summer? Simply set the time period you want to observe, and hover over different regions on a map of the United States to learn how they performed.
Just as the Tekmetric system for auto repair shop management gives shop owners better insights into their shops, the TM-500 gives Auto Repair Professionals better insights into their industry.
But knowing is only half the battle.
A Catalyst for Digital Transformation
The auto repair industry has lagged behind almost every other service industry in how we utilize technology. Almost anyone with a smartphone can order a pizza, sushi, enchiladas, or any other food they want and track it while it’s being delivered to their door.
Meanwhile, someone paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a new transmission still has to go in-person and deal with a half-legible piece of paper that feels greasier than the pizza and enchiladas put together!
But we get it. People are sometimes reluctant to change. For many auto shop owners, however, the COVID-19 pandemic was the “now or never” moment to fully digitize their shops.
In 2020, Tekmetric prioritized the rollout of several features we had been working on to help shops provide their customers with the experience they’ve come to expect in almost every other part of their lives. In April of 2020, we rolled out Text-to-Pay, allowing shops to invoice and collect payment via text message.
In November of 2020, we rolled out True Two-Way Texting to make it easy for service advisors and customers to communicate throughout the entire repair process.
Combined, these two features enabled Tekmetric users to provide a completely touchless experience to their customers without sacrificing the quality of their work or customer service.
Much like in other industries, customers who bring their cars in for repairs appreciate the extra service and transparency of a more enhanced, digitally assisted customer experience.
As we watched many shops grow by using Tekmessage and Tekmerchant, we kept an eye on the overall performance of the TM-500. We were able to see when shops began to bounce back in summer after an early slump, and developed other understandings about where the industry was headed.
Over time, we have added new metrics to the TM-500 such as state-by-state Labor Margin, Parts Margin, Effective Labor Rate, and Car Count to gain a more complete picture of these high-performing shops.
What Have We Learned Since the Onset of the Pandemic?
When making conclusions about where the industry is going, we like to be informed by both quantitative and qualitative data.
The numbers give us a factual look at what’s gone up or down, and talking to people in the industry helps us make correlations between how certain behaviors, processes, and principles affect these trends.
Between the data we gathered from the TM-500 and the feedback we were able to gather from talking to auto shop owners, here’s what we have learned.
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