Digital Workflow: Paper is still the main tool used at the dealership but think about the technician who’s at the furthest bay. That technician must stop, clean up, and then walk all the way to the service office. Don’t forget the return trip too. Give your technicians tools to send information to the service office more efficiently, such as using their mobile devices. Digital Timesheets: Digital timesheets reduce errors and discrepancies, especially as it re- lates to warranty work orders. They allow technicians to input the exact time on the clock. If they can clock it on a mobile device, then even better. The technician doesn’t have to run back to the dealership or have someone else run to the computer to clock in their job. In fact, with the labor time rounding built into DIS, you can even have a few minutes of time automatically added to applicable labor billing segments, further improving the departmental results. Monitoring: When service managers monitor their techs and workloads, they use large whiteboards, excel sheets, and some digital dashboards. But even those spreadsheets and dashboards won’t show you when a technician goes over the allotted job time. Having an app or website allows you to take your phone to monitor and understand what technicians are doing, and to assign another technician to help if needed. Planning: A digital planning solution—ideally one with job queuing based on technician skill and availability—will give you visibility into one or more weeks at a time to manage and schedule technicians and their work orders. Having a multi-week planning tool also gives vis- ibility into the current week and several weeks after. This allows service managers to account for and plan for proper coverage if a technician is away. Direct Messaging: Imagine a world where service employees aren’t taking or making phone calls all day long, dealing with the salesman who wants to know what’s going on with the ser- vice work order, or dealing with someone who’s dropping off a piece of equipment and waiting for a technician to discuss some information with them. Having a tool that can directly update customers about the status of their equipment will save your technicians time and enable your team to address any issues that come up sooner.
Before, we had a box on the side of each workstation where I would physically drop the paper into and write whatever notes I needed to write on there. But one benefit is that the phone is now their box. So instead of dropping physical papers in there, I drop that card on their phone and that becomes their box.
Live video service support and texting from within [your] business system are already market standards.
ALLAN MARTIN Maple Lane Farm Service
ROBY DUGGAN Service Manager at Plevna Implement
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