July/August 2020

JULY/AUGUST 2020 AFTERMARKET 13 www.aftermarketonline.net P h tner wit ar , r t er and fur , bett r he , tise xper ’ es ian hnic ec s – e solution vic ser h orlds – a ric h wt f bo o he hin t en pioneering wit h, ec t gen GDi t x o ne t a Pioneer e w O d D F ef e sa les driv ehic es v sur n our t h y her wit oget h t hic etivav E heritage and inno t he bes ombines t ivision c s be hnologies ha ec elphi T s e solution vic om full ser r eser s rt . All righ hnologies ec © 2020 Delphi T ed. v many businesses to date as collating this information has required a full- time employee and a Cambridge degree just to extract the information from their current systems or crunch spreadsheets, another process prone to errors. TechMan has this process hardwired into the system from the time a booking is made, right through to invoicing. This allows our customers to workshop load the diary, with track, trace and report accessible at the touch of a button. This process can no longer be ignored, with nearly every one of our customers – more than 90% in fact – opting for this feature for the post COVID-19 world. This gives users a full understanding of how they reached the figures in their bank account, as opposed to not understanding the process at all. Here at TechMan we have been looking at ways we can improve on our own processes, and this has led to the introduction of some exciting new features: LKQ Euro Car Parts catalogue integration: Ordering parts or generating prices for customers are the two biggest time consumers for workshops we are constantly told. TechMan users purchased more than 2.7 million car parts and tyres in 2019, with even the smallest of operations spending hours a day generating estimates or adding parts onto job cards. With TechMan’s newest integration customers can now access a full parts catalogue, pricing and availability from their local LKQ Euro Car Parts branch. The integration has been met with some outstanding feedback with customers now telling us that “picking up the phone to order parts for tomorrows jobs, is now a thing of the past.” Some have even changed their primary supply to LKQ ECP explaining “Euros were never our primary supplier, but with the ease of ordering through TechMan we have now found ourselves spending a lot more money with them.” Digital Kanban board : TechMan’s second release during COVID-19 has been the eagerly awaited digital Kanban board, a project worked on in conjunction with Andy Savva, The Garage Inspector. Our aim was to bring the format of a manual, but well established and recognised tool, to the digital platform. Andy has been advising garage owners for some time to use tools such as Kanban to support the workflow of their businesses, having studied strategies like Kaizen (continuous improvement). The result is workshop controllers and business owners alike now have even more information available to them at a glance all in one place. Upturn At TechMan we understand that more than ever, workshops need to ditch old habits and processes. Garage businesses need to make use of this enforced downturn to resurrect your business, ready for the upturn. Those that don’t may find themselves caught off-guard by those that have moved to the next level in workshop and customer management. www.aftermarketonline.net

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