Workshop efficiency is important now more than ever as business look to drive down overheads and increase profitability. Make the best use of the resources at your disposal!
Driving Efficiency and Profitability
Part 2 – Workshop Loading
Workshop efficiency is important now more than ever as business look to drive down overheads and increase profitability. There are several areas within your electronic workshop loading diary which can really help boost and balance your workshop loading and efficiencies leading to a more profitable workshop.
We’ve put together this information to help you understand how to get the most out of the workshop loading diary in your DMS and make the best use of the resources at your disposal.
Hours Available
The base of the workshop loading diary is the hours available each day. This is displayed at the top of the loading diary screen as a graph to help give you a simple, easy-to-understand view of how full your workshop is over the next seven days.
This graph is dynamic, so clicking on a different date will update the graph to show that day and the next 6 days. The graph is made up the number of operatives in the workshop (whether they are Technicians, Fitters or Mechanics) and how many hours they work each day. Holidays, sickness and other time off can be accounted for in the operative schedule and this updates the available hours.
Skillsets
Importantly, each technician is given a list of skills or abilities. These skills are customisable in the utils menu of the system.
When a booking is created you can assign a total duration to be booked out of the diary, this time comes from the lines of labour assigned to the diary booking and is built up using:
- Your own Menu Pricing, which can be built into the DMS (Click here for Part 1 – Menu Pricing)
- Standard all-make repair times from Glass’s ICME
- Manually typed lines of Labour
- Manufacturer Menu Pricing (where available)
Every line of labour booked into the diary can have a skillset assigned to it, which in turn will filter out to show only operatives which have this skill. This means bookings will only be created when there is time and resource to carry out those tasks.
This stops you booking 15 hours of diagnostic work in a day when you only have 1 person to carry out diagnostic work, for example.
Mot Slots
Mot’s can be both lucrative but also troublesome to manage. We have developed an MOT slot booking system which allows for multiple bays to be set up per workshop. Each slot per day day is given start and end times as well as duration of test. Against each diary booking that is made you can then select a time slot for when the MOT is to be carried out.
This stops double booking for waiting jobs as well as bringing better control over when MOTs are done.
Workshop clocking live link
The workshop clocking module within Evolution is simple and easy to use but it also has the benefit of linking live to, and updating, the diary to show when the time booked and the time worked differs, which of course is most of the time.
This means if you estimate a job will take 3 hours and it only takes 2 then you can see this reflected in the loading diary. This allows for decisions to be made about last minute bookings and on the flip side when jobs overrun it can be handled and dealt with quickly.
Loan car diary
Loan car availability is visible in the diary and each loan car can be assigned to 1 booking per day. Because this is recorded in the diary you can quickly and easily recall the information in cases where you receive speeding tickets and parking fines.
SMS reminders
Using Gemini Dispatch, our automated marketing module, you can set up automated reminders to be sent vie SMS to customers to remind them they are booked in.
This has been proven to significantly reduce the amount of no-shows and thus reducing lost time.
Key Tag Labels
In the diary there is the option to print key tag labels for the day, or a range of days.
They will print on to sticky labels and the size and dimensions etc. can be customised to suit your own requirements. This means you can print a batch in one batch and stick them to the key fobs or tags as the customers arrive.
If you would like to utilise any of these features then please contact our Support Team on 0044 (0)844 335 3914.
