If you’re managing a vehicle repair shop, then you’re probably familiar with estimating software and use it as a crucial part of your appraisal process. This is fine, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, if you run a body shop, estimating systems only help with part of your repair process.
Estimating gets the job started. Managing the work, the parts, and the profits is where real control happens and keeps your shop moving.
This is precisely what body shop management software is designed to do—it takes care of many of the day-to-day headaches that come with running a shop. Once you’ve used it, it’s hard to imagine going back.
It’s literally that useful for operations and profits, and here’s a breakdown of what we’re talking about.
What is a Shop Management System?
Imagine vehicle repair shop software that imports estimates – no need for double entry – and helps you manage parts, tech efficiency, communicate directly with customers, and handle billing, all in one place.
This is what a collision shop software delivers. It’s a single, central, simplified platform that makes running your business easier across the board, with its benefits becoming visible very quickly.
With an SMS interface, you get a clear, real-time view of your entire shop – from operations and costs to areas that need attention – so you can stay in control and make smarter decisions faster.
For example, software for body shops is designed to handle a wide range of everyday tasks and responsibilities, such as:
- Scheduling appointments
- Sending appointment reminders
- Running an appointment calendar
- Creating and managing work orders
- Handling workflow operations and production documents
- Assigning jobs to technicians
- Managing parts, vendors, parts reconciliation, and costing
- Generating a panorama of shop productivity through a visual production board
- Being able to see a monthly performance dashboard
- Processing payments
- Communicating with customers via email and text messaging
- Automating invoicing and payment handling
The above might seem like a lot to manage with yet another software subscription. Still, once you’re using the software, they flow together almost organically and are surprisingly easy to learn.
More importantly, once you incorporate shop management software into your daily workflow, it becomes hard to see how you managed without it. It’s a bit like going from manual job costing to using estimating software –the advantage is blindingly obvious once it’s in place.
How Shop Management Software Makes a Huge Difference
One of the fundamental things that vehicle repair shop software offers is the ability to get the most from your shop’s resources. It can do this in these efficient ways.
Speeding Things Up
To start with, let’s talk about speed. Having your body shop handle its repair jobs and administration quickly is about more than just a competitive advantage; it’s also just a basic cost saver for almost everything that happens in the shop.
Turnaround expectations are higher than ever, but with the right shop management operations in place, you can maintain your quality while working more efficiently.
This is where car repair shop software can really count. It lets you stop manually administering your shop and eliminates the minor errors that inevitably occur with manual administration.
Just as estimating software lets you deliver faster, more accurate estimates for collision work, software for body shops does the same, but for almost every level of your shop’s operations.
A Clearer View of Operations
You won’t always be able to perfectly control the performance of your staff, the reliability of your parts suppliers, or the complexity of dealing with customer requests.
What you can do, however, is give yourself a tool for handling all of these things much more immediately and precisely.
Collision shop software can also immediately help with this. It gives you the specific production and admin tools to see in real time where technicians could be more efficient, how parts could be more effectively sourced, and how job cycles could be streamlined.
With this detailed panorama of your shop’s daily, weekly, and monthly performance, you can get a grip on problems and costs almost immediately. This, in turn, lets you shave all kinds of hidden waste off your business operations.
Running the Front and Back of the Shop Smoothly
A shop management system also lets you coordinate both your staff and customers much more effectively.
You can use the software’s dashboard to assign work to technicians without ambiguity and provide your office staff with specific updates on what they need to tell customers.
You can also directly communicate with those customers right through your shop management platform and keep them informed of anything they need to know.
Getting Ahead of Problems
You and your shop managers can also identify bottlenecks as they emerge and address them before they disrupt parts of your shop operations.
For example, with the issue of parts delays. These can clog up your workflow and delay an entire repair job. A well-designed shop management system lets you cut this out of the picture by keeping track of orders, back orders, and refunds in real time.
By keeping an eye on these in one single platform, you and your shop managers can reduce downtime to an absolute minimum and deliver cars to customers on schedule or sooner.
Making Your Shop Efficient Across the Board
The key takeaway about a collision shop management system is that it offers the best aspects of estimating software and scales them up to every other important part of your business.
This is what makes this platform so powerful: you can do more in less time, more precisely, and more profitably. You can also refine your operations to outperform competitors who aren’t using this powerful tool.
If you’re already using estimating software, then a shop management platform is the obvious next step if you want to grow your business to be bigger and better with minimal new costs.
If you are ready to take the stress out of running your shop, ImEX Systems offers the tools to help you do it. Want to see how it works? Reach out for a free demo here – we’ll walk you through it.