Impact of Shop Management Systems on Roles Within the Auto Shop 

Looking at a shop management system can be a terrifying proposition. Knowing how it’s going to impact your day-to-day workflow, how your employees will like it, or whether it will even make an impact on the bottom line can all be questions that make it difficult to know whether choosing an auto shop management system is the right decision for your shop. Fortunately, many people have made this journey before you, so ShopBoss has some powerful insights into how this new change will affect the different roles within your business.  

For you as the owner, the benefits of having a shop management system are going to be seen in two ways. The primary way is the time savings that you will see by automating many of the tasks you do on a regular basis. From managing your schedule, and pulling quick end-of-day reports, to even managing your employees’ hours, a shop management system can allow you to spend a lot less time manually managing the business.  

The second way a system will benefit your auto shop is by looking at your bottom line. A shop management system that is properly set up will track your profitability for each job that you do. It will calculate the margins you should charge on your parts, and it can even adapt to the efficiencies of your employees, allowing you to ensure you are charging correctly for your shop. With your time freed up and your profitability increasing, you will be able to chase the growth that you would like to see in your business.  

Your technicians will see a major improvement in their roles with the implementation of a shop management system. The system will provide a labor guide and accurately track the hours spent on jobs to make certain that technicians are being properly compensated for the work that they do. It will speed up communication as well, keeping them focused and minimizing interruptions from the front about scheduling and job progress.  

However, one of the most important ways that it will impact their role in the business is by providing them with a simplified way to do their job. They can quickly see the jobs laid out in front of them, see the part numbers they need for the job, the hours they will be paid to do it, and can even access labor guides with repair data and wiring diagrams to speed up their diagnostic or repair work. These powerful tools allow your technicians to be more efficient, opening up time to accomplish more work quickly and making both them and your shop more money.  

The service advisor on the front counter interacts with the system the most out of everyone in your shop. They can use the management system to check a customer in, perform initial walkaround inspections, build estimates, keep a communication log, send out inspections, verify margins, and even collect authorizations and payments. Because this is the most important tool that your service advisor will use, making sure you have the right system affects them the most.  

When a business chooses the correct shop management system, the service advisor’s many tasks can be done more efficiently. For example, having an integrated labor guide and parts ordering tool will keep your service advisor from wasting time trying to manually look up everything on the estimate. In addition, by performing mark-up calculations for them, you can be confident in the best margins while minimizing human error.  

Finally, the accounting and bookkeeping team will benefit from the automatic tracking of sales tax, shop supply fees, inventory, and even employee hours. Instead of manually logging all the data for the shop in order to run their books, they can quickly select the report they need and have the data at their fingertips. By freeing up hours of work for your office team, you allow them to focus on what really should be their job – year-end taxes, payroll, and keeping your vendors accountable. Ultimately, this will benefit your bottom line by allowing them to be more productive. 

You may have other roles within your business, and there are many other ways a shop management system can impact your business. This gives a quick baseline of reasons to entertain a shop management system. We see shops every day cut their workload so drastically, that they are able to bring in more vehicles and generate more revenue. In short, a shop management system is the most important tool in your entire business, as it is likely the only one to be used on every vehicle. Except maybe that 10mm socket.