How Can Garages Improve Efficiencies And Profit In The Workshop?

As modern day technology advances, garages utilising dealer management systems are becoming more and more paperless and digitalising their day-to-day processes to improve workshop efficiencies and increase their profit by streamlining their operations.

Queueing up at clocking machines mounted on the wall and handing paper job cards around the garage are both traditional tasks which are taking time out of your technicians’ days and eating into their efficiency percentages. Over the course of a year, this accumulated time would have instead been better spent working on more vehicles and growing your business in the process.

Digital job cards are a great timesaver for garages to allow technicians to clock on and off jobs on-the-go from a tablet or mobile device, meaning they don’t have to collect paper job cards as the day’s jobs are all available at their fingertips as and when they need them.

Technician write-ups entered digitally and stored against the service job removes the need for Service staff to type out handwritten job card comments on the DMS, saving time and eliminating data entry errors.

Service advisors can also benefit from using a handheld system to assign jobs to staff and monitor progress throughout the day, making changes when necessary to ensure the smooth running of your workshop, even if they’re away from their desk.

Alongside digital job cards, notifications are a must-have feature, sending reminders to alert both the assigned technician and service advisor when a job is nearing completion or exceeding its allocated time. Having a real-time overview of jobs, tasks and technician activity at your fingertips undoubtedly improves workshop efficiencies when making the transition to a digitalised system.

Another way of modernising your daily tasks is by recording condition reports using a handheld device rather than on paper, saving time and storing them digitally in case they need to be referred back to. Logging any defects with a customer’s vehicle on a tablet or mobile device before work begins is a great way of building trust and avoiding potential disputes upon collection, especially when you can easily pinpoint the size and severity of any issues for future reference.

Vehicle health checks are also now commonly performed on a handheld device, with traffic light systems proving to be the clearest way to describe the condition of a vehicle to your customer. Instantly sending these condition reports to your customer, and attaching images and videos to explain issues comprehensively where necessary, will build trust and understanding as you provide evidence of any defects in an easy-to-understand way, while increasing the chance to upsell any work.

Dealer management system integration is essential if utilising app-based systems, with time-saving benefits gained from using a mobile device and a reduction in errors where information was previously having to be recorded multiple times in separate systems.

The Workshop App from Dragon2000 is fully integrated with the DragonDMS and features all of the above benefits and is designed to revolutionise the way you run your workshop in 2022. Discover more about the innovative app on our website or contact our sales team for more information.

If you would like to know more about the services that Dragon2000 provides, contact us on 01327 222 333 or email sales@dragon2000.co.uk and we’ll be happy to help.