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Auto repair shops are under more pressure than ever. Tighter margins. A service technician scarcity that isn't going away. Customers who anticipate speed, openness, and a smooth experience each time they stroll through your door. Yet many shops are still working on detached systems, manual workarounds, and procedures that haven't changed in a decade.
This is the issue a recent ShopOwner webinar, sponsored by Tekmetric, tackled head-on. The discussion focused on one stealthily basic concept: the linked store. In this short article, you'll learn what a linked store workflow looks like in practice, how one multi-shop operator doubled monthly revenue after changing to Tekmetric, where the most common operational bottlenecks are concealing in your estimating procedure, and how features like SmartJobs, parts and labor matrices, and good/better/best estimates can raise your typical repair order (ARO) the average dollar quantity collected per repair order without including headcount.
It's about having the right systems talking to each other and having your team actually utilize them. John Phelps, director of channel partnerships at Tekmetric, put it clearly: "Simply due to the fact that you have an oven, that doesn't make you a chef.
Innovation released with objective one that links price quotes, parts ordering, inspections, payments, and consumer communication into a single workflow is a growth engine. Tekmetric is built to be exactly that. With 70-plus integrations, built-in digital lorry inspections (DVIs digital assessment kinds that record photos, videos, and findings shared directly with consumers), real-time reporting, and a native mobile app for professionals and service consultants, it's created so every step of the repair order (RO) streams into the next without friction, duplication, or lost data.
As president and CEO of Lanier Automobile Group which today operates 4 rooftops in the northern Atlanta suburban areas he spent years running a single store that simply might not break through a specific regular monthly revenue level."We were stuck," Lanier stated throughout the webinar. "We had our ways of doing things.
2 years later, that number had actually climbed to roughly $400,000 a structural shift in what the organization was capable of, not just an incremental gain. A linked workflow that brought parts buying, DVIs, payments, accounting, marketing, and inventory into one platform.
"If you do not come up with systems to improve things, that individual becomes the bottleneck in the store," Lanier said. "Some tickets can take 30 minutes to an hour to find all the parts and pieces you require for huge jobs."We've empowered the technicians by giving them a computer at their bay and a dual display setup so they can go straight into Tekmetric, pull up PartsTech, use diagrams and images to quickly identify the exact part they need, and put the part on the ticket," he discussed.
Advisors clean up grammar, include photos, and present. That's it. No back-and-forth. No screaming throughout the store floor. This is the linked store in practice. Tekmetric's combination with PartsTech implies technicians can browse multiple suppliers in one lookup, confirm part specifications, and include products to ROs without leaving the platform.
Seeking Body Shop Transparency: the Consumer GuideOne of the most ignored chauffeurs of ARO growth isn't sales technique it's consistency. Phelps highlighted this throughout the webinar: if a customer recalls a week later on requesting for a brake quote and gets a number $50 various from what they were informed before, trust breaks down. Inconsistency in how price quotes are developed varying labor rates, different parts markups, or service advisors quoting from memory costs shops money and consumers.
Parts matrices and labor matrices create a consistent prices foundation so every quote shows the store's real margins, despite which consultant develops the ticket or when. SmartJobs Tekmetric's exclusive canned job system that automatically pre-populates parts, labor, and job notes for typical services takes this additional by making sure the best parts populate whenever, on every RO."If you're not utilizing SmartJobs, powered by PartsTech, in Tekmetric, connect to support, get your SmartJobs set up, and you'll be taking a massive advance," Jake Benson, director of tactical accounts at PartsTech, stated during the webinar.
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