Tekmetric announced at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas its latest offering—Smart Jobs, a one-click solution to building an entire repair order in under a minute.
Using Smart Jobs, an auto repair shop can improve the speed and efficiency of its service advisors by retrieving and populating all the necessary information to complete a repair order in a minimal number of steps. This means when an advisor adds an item or service to a repair order, Smart Jobs does the heavy lifting.
Chris Chagnon, chief operating officer of Cardinal Plaza Shell in Springfield, Virginia, was among the first to use Smart Jobs. He says the time savings coupled with its ease of use has been the biggest benefit of using Smart Jobs.
"What makes it so great is that it's essentially the push of a button, maybe two, and the job is built for you. You don't have to go and source labor. The parts, if they're in your inventory, appear right there. So, depending on how vast somebody's inventory is, that may be just one button click. Even if we need to source them from a different supplier, it's integrated into it; you click it. So, maybe two button presses, and you've got yourself a job built,” Chagnon says.
For a shop like Chagnon’s—a nine-bay, 15,000-square-foot shop with 25 employees—efficiency is a high priority, and he says by using Smart Jobs, his advisors can get back to the customer faster.
"It frees advisors up to do the stuff that we want them to do— treating the customers, giving them an acceptable experience, making sure everything is OK on the back end and answering phones. So, the killer feature I think with Smart Jobs is the time savings and the simplicity,” Chagnon says.
An aspect of Smart Jobs that’s also attractive to him is that it removes the technical knowledge barrier. A service advisor who possesses less technical knowledge can bypass those gaps using Smart Jobs.
“I don't think it takes as much technical knowledge to use Smart Jobs for a new advisor. It would make training a little bit easier (since they) don't have to know where to go to look up all these labors and (they) don't need to punch in all this stuff to find the right parts. Smart Jobs will essentially do it all for you,” Chagnon says.
Tekmetric founder Sunil Patel says the primary function of shop management software is to build repair orders and when developing Smart Jobs, he aimed to eliminate the pain points of this process for advisors, starting at the DVI in some instances.
“The purpose of Smart Jobs is to be able to increase the efficiency of the service writer in the repair shop. If a technician is performing a digital inspection on a vehicle and marking something that needs to be replaced, they click it … and as soon as that item is marked yellow or red inside of Tekmetric, the job will automatically get built,” Patel says.
For busy shops, this means faster estimates and quicker in-person wait times for customers, which translates to higher car counts.
“If you think about time the customer has to wait on an estimate … that's irritating for the customer. And then the service writer has to go through all of these hoops and hurdles to try and figure out what this cost is going on this particular job. I just give it to you in one click, and you're done … Everything happens automatically—the sourcing of the part, checking your inventory to see if you have it in stock, the labor operation, everything is automatic. So, the amount of time it's going to save, and I'm talking about a lot of time, think about how that translates to how many vehicles you can process during the day. It’s exponential,” Patel says.
Chagnon says his shop, which sees on average upwards of 1,750 cars per month, is already seeing the time savings and the added car account as a result.
“It is a truly game-changing feature. I think that it's going to make a lot of the people who have to do job after job after job very happy when it comes to making things streamlined and simple.”
