Traveling around the country working with shops to improve their processes, I've met shop owners using their management systems to varying degrees. While most management systems can help manage all aspects of a repair shop, some simply use it to produce invoices.
While others are using a majority of their system, I rarely see a shop that uses all of their system, especially the areas that can save them money. Most people do not think about their management system being a money saver, but when used correctly, the management system can add dollars to the bottom line.
I have seen shops use their management systems to monitor production but schedule incoming work using a desk calendar. I think scheduling and production should be tied together. If you don't, you could end up with more repairs coming in the shop than you have going out, which can become expensive.
Let's say you have a hiccup in production that delays a repair. The scheduler is not aware of it and continues to bring in repairs according to the schedule. The repair is brought in on Monday, but because of the hiccup, the repair is not actually touched until Wednesday. Now this excess repair inventory is accruing cycle time and more than likely will require the shop to absorb some rental expense.
Now let's look at that same repair from the parts management perspective. Since scheduling is handled on a desk calendar and not within the management system, parts monitoring does not exist. Because of this disconnect, the scheduler was not aware that two critical parts had not been received by the scheduled repair date.
If the scheduling and parts management processes were coordinated through the management system, a potentially expensive delay could be prevented. The scheduler could have checked a "Received Parts List" the day prior to the scheduled in date, verified parts status, and contacted the customer to reschedule the repair.
An additional benefit to monitoring scheduling and parts management together on a management system is to coordinate parts purchasing with the scheduled arrival date. This allows you to delay purchasing parts until a couple days prior to the day of repair, eliminating warehousing of parts that adds costs to your daily expense.
Controlling production through a management system allows you to monitor repairs throughout the process to help reduce cycle time. You can establish priorities, control a technician's workload, and identify constraints that slow down the process. Some systems allow you to automatically flag technicians as a repair moves through production, reducing administrative time. Additionally, you can send notes, customer requests, and real time information directly to technicians through shop work stations keeping the tech in their repair area and more productive.
Most managements systems will allow you to create digital folders within your repair order to store documents and photos. All the items that now occupy a hard folder can be scanned and added to the digital repair order folder within the management system. Using your management system to create a paperless office can greatly reduce expenses. Think about the money spent on the copies of documents you make for the folder, to create a working copy, for the estimator. Those expenses are in addition to the cost of the folder itself, the month/year stickers, and other labels you use to properly identify the folder.
Using the digital folder in your management system allows a scanned document to be seen by all who have access to the system, eliminating the need for multiple copies and saving the time used to chase down a folder. When the job is complete, all the documents are archived within the management system allowing you to remove unsightly file cabinets and do something worthwhile with the time spent filing.
These examples are a few of the many ways you can use your management system to reduce time and expense. A review of your management system's capabilities with the provider will help you find the ones that will work best for you.
