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Vehicle repair work shops are under more pressure than ever. Tighter margins. A service technician scarcity that isn't disappearing. Consumers who anticipate speed, openness, and a smooth experience each time they stroll through your door. Yet lots of shops are still running on disconnected systems, manual workarounds, and processes that haven't altered in a decade.
This is the issue a current ShopOwner webinar, sponsored by Tekmetric, tackled head-on. The discussion focused on one deceptively basic concept: the linked store. In this article, you'll discover what a connected store workflow looks like in practice, how one multi-shop operator doubled monthly earnings after switching to Tekmetric, where the most common operational traffic jams are concealing in your estimating procedure, and how features like SmartJobs, parts and labor matrices, and good/better/best price quotes can raise your average repair work order (ARO) the typical dollar amount gathered per repair order without adding headcount.
How to Fix Small Collision ImpactsIt's about having the best systems talking to each other and having your team really utilize them. John Phelps, director of channel partnerships at Tekmetric, put it clearly: "Just because you have an oven, that doesn't make you a chef. You can have the technology, but if you're not leveraging it properly, what good is it doing?"That distinction matters.
Innovation released with objective one that connects estimates, parts ordering, examinations, payments, and consumer interaction into a single workflow is a growth engine. Tekmetric is developed to be exactly that. With 70-plus combinations, built-in digital automobile assessments (DVIs digital evaluation kinds that record photos, videos, and findings shared straight with clients), real-time reporting, and a native mobile app for professionals and service consultants, it's developed so every step of the repair order (RO) streams into the next without friction, duplication, or lost information.
As president and CEO of Lanier Car Group which today runs 4 rooftops in the northern Atlanta suburban areas he invested years running a single store that merely could not break through a particular month-to-month revenue level."We were stuck," Lanier said during the webinar. "We had our ways of doing things.
Two years later on, that number had climbed to approximately $400,000 a structural shift in what the company was capable of, not simply an incremental gain. A linked workflow that brought parts purchasing, DVIs, payments, accounting, marketing, and stock into one platform.
"If you do not come up with systems to simplify things, that person ends up being the traffic jam in the shop," Lanier stated. "Some tickets can take 30 minutes to an hour to find all the parts and pieces you require for big jobs."We've empowered the technicians by providing them a computer at their bay and a double monitor setup so they can go directly into Tekmetric, pull up PartsTech, utilize diagrams and images to quickly recognize the precise part they require, and put the part on the ticket," he explained.
No yelling throughout the shop flooring. This is the linked store in practice. Tekmetric's integration with PartsTech implies specialists can browse multiple providers in one lookup, confirm part requirements, and add products to ROs without leaving the platform.
How to Fix Small Collision ImpactsOne of the most overlooked chauffeurs of ARO growth isn't sales strategy it's consistency. Phelps highlighted this during the webinar: if a customer recalls a week later requesting a brake quote and gets a number $50 various from what they were told in the past, trust breaks down. Disparity in how estimates are built varying labor rates, various parts markups, or service consultants pricing estimate from memory costs stores cash and consumers.
Parts matrices and labor matrices develop a constant rates structure so every estimate shows the shop's actual margins, no matter which consultant develops the ticket or when. SmartJobs Tekmetric's proprietary canned job system that automatically pre-populates parts, labor, and task notes for common services takes this additional by making sure the best components occupy whenever, on every RO."If you're not using SmartJobs, powered by PartsTech, in Tekmetric, reach out to support, get your SmartJobs established, and you'll be taking a massive advance," Jake Benson, director of strategic accounts at PartsTech, stated throughout the webinar.
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