How to Stop Dropping the Ball

Post-It notes? Mental checklists? A pen and paper? How are you managing your shop’s tasks?

On this episode of The Digital Shop Talk Radio, Mike Holmes (Holmes Auto Repair) tells us how the Task Manager on the new AutoVitals’ TVP.X has turned his service team into efficient, error-free Task Masters. Not to mention the $200 ARO increase he saw after implementation. Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Why it’s much harder to put out fires vs. preventing them in the first place
• How the Task Manager helps shops stay organized and focused on production
• Real-life examples from a shop owner who is using it

Episode Transcript

*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].

Tom Dorsey (00:00:03):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and this week we’re going to be talking about how to manage your interrupts in your day, how to stop dropping that ball from all those tasks that you’re juggling all the time. And as always, I’ve got my expert panel of experts, Bill Connor and Uwe Kleinschmidt joining us and welcome gentlemen. And we’re really excited to have on Mike Holmes from Holmes Auto Repair, who’s coming in as a turbo shop, right? Somebody who’s been kind of behind the scenes helping working with Bill and Uwe and Carlo and all the other turbo shops that are helping us to kind of develop some of these new functionalities that are coming out for you. And Task Manager is one of those that helps us to keep those balls in the air, reduce the amount of balls actually that we need to focus on. Let the machine focus on the next steps while you focus on the customer and your goal, which is to provide better service and make more money. So welcome, welcome, welcome, Mike Holmes. It’s been a long time, buddy. Great, to see you.
Mike Holmes (00:01:15):
Yes, thank you. It has, I think was the first of the year when we were at the conference.
Tom Dorsey (00:01:18):
Yeah, we were at conference last time. I saw you.
Mike Holmes (00:01:21):
Lot of things. Yeah. Time
Tom Dorsey (00:01:22):
Flies buddy. Time flies. I’ll tell you what, especially in Covid times, I was just talking with folks out before the show and it’s hard to believe it’s coming up on August. Kids are going back to school in a couple of weeks.
Mike Holmes (00:01:34):
Yeah, we hope so. We hope so.
Tom Dorsey (00:01:36):
Yeah, we hope so. Exactly. It depends on where you live, I guess. But let’s jump right into it. We’ve got some pretty good information to share with you today and we really want to focus on the how to so that when folks are coming able to get onto the new TVPX, Mike, they’re able to kind of jump in on some of those real good time savers and efficiency tools that you’ve kind of been privy to here over the last few months. How’s that been working out for you? Let me ask you this, what do you think, from what you’ve been working on and the things that as it starts to get used regularly in the shop from the task manager perspective, how has that been helping you guys at the front counter?
Mike Holmes (00:02:32):
Well, it boils back to if you can take it out of your mind and write it down, brings up a little room for the other, and you’re not so apt to forget it, it’s a new process. We’ve all had different processes in ways we use post-it notes wonder lists and stuff like that. But when you can integrate it like this, it is definitely going to be a time saver. You don’t want to forget anything. If you forget one thing, it’s going to be the wrong no matter what. So there’s definitely a great benefit to it. And I can see a lot of room for additions, different ways we can use it. I’ve even been playing with the team viewer and using it on my iPhone, trying to add other tasks for my personal, that way you don’t have one place to go.
Tom Dorsey (00:03:22):
And for folks, I should probably tell ’em what we’re talking about a little bit. For folks who haven’t seen some of the previous episodes where we’ve been talking about Task manager basically takes all of your inbound kind of activities and actions, technician submits an inspection sheet. And in the current today’s vehicle page, you’ll get a notification and you can kind of scroll through and find that stuff if you dig for it. And even customer communications inbound, even website appointment request type or I should say appointment reminder, appointment requests come in as messages and those become automated tasks. And so what Mike was saying, instead of downloading it out of your head and we’re used to writing it maybe on a post-it note or updating a whiteboard and stuff, this will automatically create a task for you. It’s called the task manager. And you can find there’s some great videos that are posted up on Help AutoVitals and online and looks like. And we’ve got, Bill is going to show us. Bill, why don’t we just go ahead and take a look at what you’re showing there so we can give folks an overview of the task manager real quick.
Bill Connor (00:04:33):
And so Mike, is it okay to go ahead and share a screen of your shop?
Mike Holmes (00:04:36):
Absolutely.
Bill Connor (00:04:37):
I was going to say the correct response is yes
Mike Holmes (00:04:42):
On that because I tripped you up.
Bill Connor (00:04:44):
Oh yeah. So there you go. So there you go. So this is a task that has actually come in and is actually in the message here. So it first comes in as a message from the technician, and then if the service writer misses that, then they’re going to be able to go ahead and pull it up as a task to go ahead and go through also. So if I could ever figure out where my mouse went, one of my many monitors, and so this is what it looks like is it comes in from the monitor or from the technician down in the lower right hand corner is a task. And then if the service writer misses that, there’s no way they can miss it completely because it’s going to still go ahead and show up in this list as a task for them to do.
(00:05:28):
And then it’s broken down into parts. So that’s the basic gist of it. And we can talk about the benefits to the shop and so on, but to me this is all about there’s time savings because you can’t miss anything. But really the time savings comes in is when you don’t go ahead and create fires that you have to put out and then go ahead and rebuild whatever got burnt in the process. So having it all in one place is great, but going ahead and preventing fires and save the time for having to patch that relationship with a customer or whatever it might be is really kind of huge.
Tom Dorsey (00:06:03):
Yeah, sure. And it’s kind of like the time it takes to write it down, the time it takes to rewrite it down, the time it takes to edit it, when you get more information, the time it takes to find that post-it note, wherever it got buried, all of that is also an added time savings. And then just the ability to, and you can reprioritize those tasks right there. You just drag them into proper order. And when you complete the activity, let’s say the task is edit the inspection result, you go in and do the edit and the edit is done, it’s going to automatically go in and complete that task for you. It’s not going to make you go back in and check it off.
Bill Connor (00:06:45):
And there’s one other thing that’s really good about that also is let’s say that a task has got four different elements of it and the service writer gets interrupted as step number two. They go back into that task and it’s going to say, okay, now take off from here.
Tom Dorsey (00:07:00):
Yes, yes. That’s fantastic
Mike Holmes (00:07:03):
As well. You can also assign that task to someone else if it’s something somebody else should handle, you can just click it and it is gone to them. And there’s also methods to go back and see if they’ve completed it. If you need to check up on it, you’re curious of where they are at in that task. We’re right on the verge of going to the production manager and trying get the process that’s worked out. I think the benefit we see there when we do it from that is going to really show the opportunities that you have with that.
Tom Dorsey (00:07:40):
Yeah. Because that’s where it’s going to really shine because it, it’s a great management tool, project management tool, and that’s really what your production manager is going to be doing. So Mike, because it’s one of those things, right? When you’re ONT VPX, it’s going to be there, it’s going to be working in the background. If you never open that button up and ever look at it, okay, but it’s going to benefit you if you do. How was it for your service advisors to start to use the task manager? Was there a learning curve to it or did they just take to it fish to water?
Mike Holmes (00:08:17):
Well, no, there’s always a learning curve to change. Sometimes you got to get past the change. It’s difficult because there’s usually a benefit to it. And we struggle all other places and we work through, we get certain bugs and certain procedures and way we want to do things. We don’t operate like every other shop. We don’t break our service managers up and stuff like that. But it is definitely where you can customize it and use it in your facility to fit your particular procedures. And it’s very, I’d call it tweakable. You can use certain things and I can just see there’s so many things that we’re going to be able to do with it. And so many things that we’ve already changed, it has been very good about recommendations or what we don’t like this or didn’t work of implementing those if it was a benefit and it wasn’t going to take away from the original thought of the task.
Tom Dorsey (00:09:21):
Yeah, yeah. It was like we were talking about last week. It was really when we’re talking about driving those efficiency and productivity gains, it’s just another kind of piece of the puzzle right there to when we’re really starting to dive in. When you’re starting to think through the process, what does it take to make an effective and efficient even inspection, how should a technician move around the vehicle and at at each step, what should they be observing and doing? How do we help that technician add a lot of the important elements that the service advisor and eventually the customer’s going to need for an understanding from an educational perspective like canning the notes and putting in the arrows and things like that. And the task manager Uwe is kind of an extension of that thinking behind how do we improve each and every step along this process to make it as efficient and productive as possible. And so give us a little bit of an insight, if you could Uwe on what was your thinking behind it? Where did the inspiration come from and what problem are you trying to solve?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:10:39):
Dustin, if you could put the infograph up, it might help a little bit in the explanation. Actually, I had the epiphany when we did the chat system and the turbo shop started using it. And so I realized, oh, with the increasing digitization of our communication, everything comes in through a chat or text or an email and not so much through a phone call anymore. And so I thought the interrupts are now still there, but now the system could detect them and interpret them and tell the service advisor what to do with it. But that was the initial idea. But since everything has now shifted from yelling across the shop, getting phone calls from customer to using chat systems within the shop and getting texts and emails from the customer, that was the opportunity.
(00:11:51):
And then from then the feedback was incredible from the turbo shops because now everybody thought, oh, I can actually have a central place where all my jobs and tasks in the shop can be managed. So that’s how it’s snowball to what we implemented and we added the ability to not only have automatic detections of tasks, but also just create your own tasks so it’s all in one place. And Mike, if you don’t mind, I saw from the screenshot Bill shared you have that pretty well dialed in that people use it also for manual tasks, right? So how was that process where people, how long did it take to say, okay, I’m not going to yell across the shop, I’m going to open the task manager and create a manual task instead?
Mike Holmes (00:13:00):
Well, when you do something, as long as we’ve been doing ’em, both my ladies in the office have been here over 20 years. The habits are hard to break. But definitely if they see the benefit in it, they’re definitely definitely for it. And they don’t like me yelling at ’em, so that’s a plus.
(00:13:23):
I’m not going to yell anymore. It’s okay for them to yell at me, but I’m fearful whenever it goes the other direction. And again, we’ve just got to get customized to that. Things are a little bit different and it will work. It does work. You just got to stay with it. I really like the manual part better than anything because I think the ones that Bill show a while ago were mainly ones that I had put up to remind me to do something. I wanted to make sure I ordered this part or did that. And it doesn’t take but a minute, not even that to just go in there and click a couple. You can even copy a lot of it and paste it and then just put a time to it and it’s there in one place. You don’t have to go across your desk to find, well, where was that note and how many times have you thrown a note away and had to go back and look for two or three days? It’s there. You can look at the ones that have already been completed. They’re still stored in a list so you can go back and say, ah, I did write the wrong number down or they gave me the wrong number or something like that. It’s just I think the opportunities that you can use it. There’s so many different ones and I think I’ve heard Uwe talk about some other things that it’s in the future, in the future. So I know that he’s looking down the road of what else we can do with it.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:14:53):
No, I’m happy to elaborate. I think if you combine the task manager with a workflow management system, then you can determine automatic tasks as you move from one workflow step to another and say send messages to people, customers and shop. I mean this is just the beginning of a system which will do the automation needed to save another step. So one example we have here, if you could scroll down on the infograph, so if you take the review inspection results as a task, right, there’s a step which is called create estimate. So if you create an estimate, the car should be in the estimate state. So what do we do? We move the vehicle automatically into the estimate workflow, step save CSOs advisor, another step and make sure tablet and TVP or in sync. So the moment you’re done with the image editor and the approval of the notes, we know you are done and switched automatically to the create estimate step and move automatically the vehicle into the estimate workflow step. And I predict stuff like this, we will be able to add more to the system. So if people forget to move the vehicle, then we can give alerts and give tasks to the appropriate service advisor to do something about it.
Mike Holmes (00:16:55):
I have to share an example yesterday around here, there’s very, they’ll finish the car, complete it and turn it into me to invoice it and sometimes I won’t invoice it right away and the process is after I get it, then it’ll go to one of the ladies to call and tell ’em it’s ready. Yesterday we had one where I invoiced it, but I didn’t get the key and the rest of the system to them for them to call the customer. Well the way the system’s set up now, it called the customer and thanked them or actually sent ’em an email or a text and thanked them for the repair. So they were on the car, Hey, I see my car’s ready. Well I knew it was ready but the ladies in the office. So there’s so many opportunities to do like that. What we did was we just changed it to where it’ll notify ’em later in day and you can just see that how many times will that may eliminate the step of somebody actually calling them to let ’em know it’s ready and all that’s going to tie into the task. Anything’s a task if you have to stop and do something and it’s a task and if you can automate it that’s that much more time or however much time it is, it’s going to free up for you to do something else that needs to be done because not you don’t need another task or two. I think we mostly have enough to do, but if you can automate ’em or cut any amount of time, it’s going to give you a little more flexibility.
Tom Dorsey (00:18:28):
Yeah, that’s a great point. That’s it. We really want to automate the busy work, the manual tasks and really and then gives you time to celebrate the customer interface and the communication and education so that you’re not pinned down just doing busy work all day. Focus on that customer relationship and reduce the number of tasks that somebody has to do and free that time up for get more work done. That’s the name of the game. Do we have Bill, can we kind of run through just from kind of a how to step-by step for folks that are either in the process of switching, waiting to get onto TVPX or on the list and are in the audience here and even folks as they come up and are ready to get onto the new TBPX, kind of what are the best practices? You kind of showed us the message came in and he popped the task open, but can you show some of the other abilities maybe to complete, I don’t want you to complete any of Mike’s tasks, but how they complete and how they can reprioritize and some of the ideas just from an operational perspective, give me a better insight on what it’s going to look like when it comes out.
Bill Connor (00:19:54):
So let’s go ahead and see if I can’t share a screen here. And I assume that you can see a today’s vehicle page with this on here.
Tom Dorsey (00:20:03):
Yes sir.
Bill Connor (00:20:04):
So these are a list of tasks that are in there and basically they’re in an order time-wise right now. And just like some other things that we have on the today’s vehicle page, you can drag and drop these into different orders and adjust accordingly. Or you can force ’em all the way to the bottom or all the way to the top. Anything that’s blue here, this is going to be a task that was created manually. So as Eva pointed out earlier, Mike is really on board with going ahead and creating tasks for himself and others. So they’re here and then tasks that are actually most his are actually manual here. So tasks that are in here that are automated task, a service writer, as they go through and do the different pieces of the task, it will actually keep track of where they’re at. So if it came in and said browse topics or edit pictures or send inspection as they knock out each one of them things, it’s going to go ahead and clear it and actually move on. And I think, I don’t know, Mike has actually maybe set up as a production manager, but if he is, I can left click on his name and it will allow him to go and assign them tasks to other people that are in his shop. So Mike had mentioned earlier that he’s the king of delegation. So as a product manager, basically he has the ability to see any the tasks that are coming in there and assign it to anybody accordingly.
Tom Dorsey (00:21:28):
And so from a service writer’s perspective now, would they just open this up when they need to? Would they open it up and kind of dock it? What’s the best practice when it comes to interfacing with that task manager?
Bill Connor (00:21:42):
So for the task manager, for a service writer, they’re going to get this ghost check come into the bottom here and that’s where they’re going to see initially. And if they can’t deal with it right then it’s going to be in the task manager. So to me it’s kind of just like your cell phone when that doggone thing starts getting a number count in there, you’ve got something that happened you need to know about and it’s just basically a click monitor and then start working down your task list from the top down.
Tom Dorsey (00:22:10):
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And then just like you showed just that easy to reassign and then so you’re reassigning to another service advisor or back to the production manager potentially, or I guess even Mike, do you have office personnel in there that you’re signing tasks to?
Mike Holmes (00:22:34):
Yes, it’s all capable of doing that. The one thing to remember is you don’t use this to assign tasks to the technicians. It’s a separate entity to where you can segregate it and leave the task and go do whatever you need to with the particular tile on the technician and then you can go back to it that way it keeps the technicians from getting involved in the task because I don’t think they should be involved in the task and the way this is set up, it precludes them from it unless you specifically wanted to send it to ’em, but the capability is there if you wanted to.
Bill Connor (00:23:24):
So this is an example where a technician just finished a work order here and basically it comes in and says go ahead and review the work order and if a service writer had the opportunity to do it now it’ll be down in this area where they can just click on it and do it now and basically it’ll open up the repair order and said, look down through here, make sure the completions are here. So depending on what task comes in here, when it’s clicked, it will take you right to the right area. If the service writer doesn’t finish it, then it’s going to be up in this area here where they can just click on the task and finish it. So we obviously know that service writer live in a interrupt driven world and what we want to do is again, make sure that none of the balls that they’re juggling get dropped and be able to go ahead and make sure they can pick up where they left off and if a task isn’t important that they need to do it right now, they can just drag it down the list and put it in whatever order that they need to.
Mike Holmes (00:24:21):
I’ve even been thinking about you could actually have a separate person or you could just make up a different place to where you could put a priority task if you wanted to make John Doe one that you could even separate the task that you need to do if you wanted to take it out of your list of everyday stuff. I think you’ll see there’s one in there that says called Magnolia about labs. Well, that’s a personal thing, but I thought about if I made a separate Mike Holmes the second, I could move that task over there and kind of delegate my personal stuff but still have a list of it.
Bill Connor (00:25:05):
One of the interesting things I talked to a shop owner just the other day about is that because of cloud-based management systems, cloud-based AutoVitals, task manager and all the tools we have, they basically said that I could hire a service writer and they could live in a different part of the country, do everything digitally, never have to appear in my shop and I don’t have to pay to move them. I can get a superstar from anywhere on the planet. So that was really a pretty interesting observation they come up with.
Tom Dorsey (00:25:32):
That’s right. There’s some food for thought right there. That’s interesting. Well you remember, I forget what shop it was, but they had the guy that got the back surgery and they set him up and he operated during his recovery period from a bed in his house
Bill Connor (00:25:47):
And if I remember right, they said his productivity was much higher because he didn’t have all the people stopping by and chatting with him. Yeah,
Mike Holmes (00:25:55):
I’ll be a little quieter when you say that because my secretaries are listening to that and they’ll probably tell me to start staying home,
Tom Dorsey (00:26:02):
Stay buddy, just stay in bed. Oh, that’s amazing. Add technology. So Uwe, what about from a goals and a metric perspective, what should we be looking at to see that the task manager is kind of being adopted but it’s having that kind of promised result is to say it’s going to improve efficiency and productivity and it should boost revenue? Yeah,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:26:34):
So first I think the monitoring aspect is important, meaning the production manager, whoever is in that role, the shop owner can see all tasks assigned to everybody and as Mike said, reassign, if he sees a discrepancy, right, somebody is completely behind and there is no catching up, then you better, you see how late they are in the task manager Bill showed that earlier and then assigned, right? So that’s a monitoring on the fly in real time. What we will add in the BCP is the ability to see average tasks finished per time per service advisor. So you can actually measure productivity, KPI. So this way whether they are as productive as you expect them to be, I hope it doesn’t make sense.
Tom Dorsey (00:27:41):
Yeah, no totally very interesting because then you can also do a comparison if you’ve got multiple riders you can compare and then I think work backwards and find the bottleneck, find the reason. Is it really just because most of the time it’s not I’m just lazy, I’ve got too much pressure over here or overworked or too many interrupts for whatever reason. And then you can kind of work that back and see how that affects that productivity and then find another solution, delegate reprioritize or change your process altogether like what Mike was saying and find ways you can just eliminate that task through an automation altogether. And a lot of times I got to tell you is that those automations or those task reduction best practices are kind of already built into your digital shop operating process. And so if anything, especially for you guys that are kind of self-guided, you just learned it on your own and you made it work and it fits in your operation, there’s kind of a bigger umbrella out there, at least take a look at it, go on to the help AutoVitals, take a look at the digital shop operating process, look to see how that kind of fits together, talk about it on Facebook, go onto the Facebook form.
(00:28:59):
There’s plenty of discussion threads on there about how people have done things like introduce the production manager or simply just follow some of the best practices as a first step to get you on the road to developing that task reduced process and then that frees you up for a lot more benefit and also puts the hair fires out and service advisors tend to have a more pleasant day, like their job better and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:29:34):
Do you agree Mike?
Mike Holmes (00:29:37):
Tom, you touched on that word interruptions. I’m probably the worst. Whenever I think of something and I want to talk to one of the service advisors, I don’t mean to interrupt ’em, but if I don’t get that to ’em and convey it to ’em right then I’m liable to forget it or sidetracked or railroaded. And if you stand there and tell ’em something and you’re interrupting them, they’ve lost their train of thought or whatever they were doing to where if you can just put it on a task, send it to the task and they can look at it when it’s convenient for them, they maybe even can glance at it right then inside he’s just, don’t worry about it, I’ll get to it later. They’re going to be much more productive by not having to follow through that interruption.
(00:30:29):
Just my nature is usually whenever I think of something and go in there, they know that I’m going to say it in interrupting me because I’ve got something else I need to move on to. And if I can train myself to not do that interruption, I can just see the benefit that they’re not going to get held up, forget about something or lose their train of thought. Even if they’re talking to somebody on the phone sometimes they’re talking and I can hear what they’re saying and I will try to intercede a little bit of information and whenever they’re trying to listen to me also you can see that they’ve lost their train of thought or they’re not giving that full attention to that person, whoever they’re talking to, if they’re sitting in front of the screen and they see that they can glance at and keep on going, that is going to be my biggest goal right now is to try to go in that direction. The instructions is the number one, number one distraction we have.
Tom Dorsey (00:31:35):
That’s a great idea. That’s an interesting idea, right, is to be able to do some more subtle communication when necessary and give some support and some tips and hints and a lot of times it’s a priority for you to get it downloaded, right? And to get it onto paper or to communicate it. But a lot of times from an operational perspective it might not be a priority. Matter of fact, it might be better suited in your next upcoming shop meeting and so what a great way to start to put some topics together for your shop meeting and you put a due date of Friday or whenever you have your shop meetings and you start to compile some topics and they’re in there and now you’ve got an easy place to reference those. You can get your management team and your service writers or whoever has access to that also to review and prepare and contribute and add their feedback in preparation of that meeting. And you can also use that to just compile things that you don’t want to slip through the cracks need to get it down and make it important. It’s just not important to take an action on immediately. And so we address those as a team later in the week.
(00:32:50):
You’re welcome.
Bill Connor (00:32:53):
We’ve got some
Tom Dorsey (00:32:54):
That off to you and you do what you will.
Bill Connor (00:32:57):
We have a lot of tools on the today’s vehicle page that are all about solving problems now before it becomes history. So the red, yellow green bars is an example. Make money while you can and so the task manager and the communication with the red number count in there is the same thing. Solve the problem now before it becomes a problem. So monitoring that today’s vehicle page and using the tools that are put there to make your life easier and make sure nothing gets missed is the number one line of defense I would say. And then using the business control panel for KPIs that are there now or things that are in the future. You’re looking at history but you can use the trends over time to see are you going in the right direction or not.
Tom Dorsey (00:33:38):
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s a great point because and it really is inside of the business control panel, it’s going to show you which metric you need to influence to improve the direction you want to go and get to the number you’re looking to get to. And then those tools exist. You might not be using ’em now or you might be using ’em in a not optimal way, but at least now you’re on the right track and you know what you need to focus on and then get in touch with your advisor. We’re here to help, they’re all ready and highly competent and they’ve been through these same experiences with other shops that are looking to achieve the same goals and they can help you get it instead of trial and error. They can put you on a pretty direct path to success. So get ahold of them, make sure you bring it up in your next check-in right there in the BCP, you can assign them the task just like we’re talking about in the task manager.
(00:34:40):
You have that ability inside of your business control panel as well to assign tasks to both your AutoVitals advisor as well as your business coach if you’ve got them invited in there as well and they can do the same back. And so again, it’s just really knowing that the tools are there but then putting them into your process as a best practice and using those tools to really, I can’t have said it any better, it allows him to just download that stuff and make it important, get it into process, into production. People are communicating about it and it’s top of mind now in their heads also, but without the tap on the shoulder that hits the brakes on their thinking. So Mike said it eloquently and then now they’re out of focus. We don’t want to do that. So what a great way to communicate when they’re available and ready to consume that information and then give you that feedback and keep that project communication moving forward always with your eye on the end result goal and that team collaboration helps everybody get there together.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:35:52):
Mike, if I may, you mentioned you can already think about other features and I also would like the audience. I see John is in the audience is using the task manager. If you could share with us what you see in the future as the biggest benefit, what’s missing today? We show that.
Mike Holmes (00:36:20):
I started thinking about that a while ago and I think you probably were thinking about the same thing is say we’re going to have a shop meeting or something that you could have a separate category or task or section in this to where you could go in and put that thought down, maybe even have it where like I said, have something where your personal task, your honey do list or whatever where you can segregate things to where, okay, this is the part of the task that I’m going to use for the business. Or you could even have maybe a list, a task list where you could list things of shop things that need to be done at the shop to where one of your other people could pick that shop repair list, shop maintenance lift up or something more kind of a to-do list. And there again where it is one stop because as Bill said, if you can pull something from the cloud from your house or from test driving the car or some way that it can be integrated like that, I can see where that would be a great benefit.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:37:33):
So it should be integrated with Google calendar or your personal Google calendar for example.
Mike Holmes (00:37:40):
I’m not that familiar with Google Calendar. I always use Wonder List and I see they went away with earlier, so I see he’s stuffed his face with shrimp curry. Thanks for that. See I lost my train of thought because
Tom Dorsey (00:37:57):
Yeah, he needed a task. Should have put it down. Barry Buck in the audience said diary and outlook style calendar. So kind of along those same lines that we were just discussing there. John Long said he’s too busy stuffing his face with shrimp curry to answer you. So maybe that might be an integration is that you can integrate into your favorite takeout joints and just order your shrimp curry direct for delivery right from your today’s vehicle page.
Mike Holmes (00:38:30):
You can make it reoccurring too. Once
Tom Dorsey (00:38:35):
Wednesday, June,
Mike Holmes (00:38:38):
I was on Amazon trying to get some drinks for the guy and the way you could buy it was make it reoccurring.
Tom Dorsey (00:38:44):
Yeah, there you go. Just keep them coming. Bartender. What about parts? What about are we pulling a task automatically that says order parts that if I have a parts department or a parts ordering role that they would get that directly
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:39:05):
With a parts? I mean we don’t have today a parts management feature which is on the list where you can basically manage tablet and TVP whether the parts have arrived, have been used as a core return, blah blah, blah, all that. And then you can attach tests to it
Tom Dorsey (00:39:29):
Core
Bill Connor (00:39:30):
Man. So I’ve seen quite a few people talking about the reoccurring tasks. So order do your stock order on a Monday morning or have your weekly meeting on a certain day and time. So a task that can go ahead and be reoccurring when you finish one, it automatically creates the next one. I’ve had quite a few people talk about that. I don’t know if it’s actually made it to our feature list, but that was one thing that I’ve heard quite often.
Tom Dorsey (00:40:00):
Yeah, is there the ability for team task, which would be a 10 shop meeting or show up at noon for shrimp curry?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:40:11):
Yeah. Okay, that’s a good one. Which always then is going to be split into an individual task for everybody.
Tom Dorsey (00:40:22):
Yeah, sure.
Bill Connor (00:40:25):
But tasks right now don’t go to the technicians. That would be more of a group chat message.
Mike Holmes (00:40:33):
Do you see a direction of integrating the task into the group chat or is that something that may be beneficial to where you could set a task and it automatically
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:40:46):
Then you get a reminder in the chat? Yeah, I like that idea a lot. So if you set a manual task, it should create a chat if you, whereas for the automatic task, it’s the other way around. The chat creates the task, right? For manual tasks it should be a reminder,
Mike Holmes (00:41:09):
Right?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:41:10):
Yep. I like that.
Tom Dorsey (00:41:16):
How about out in the audience? Anybody you can
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:41:20):
Join agrees with task to groups. Groups. It’s a little tedious today. What would be a typical group task if you guys could some examples. There you go. Right there. That was
Tom Dorsey (00:41:40):
Now
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:41:44):
You need a task to get lunch. Something is odd. I think a quick group chat would make that happen.
Tom Dorsey (00:41:55):
Yeah, come help to push a car, John. That’s another all hands on deck. Yeah, I guess let’s put out the fire by the compressor. That’s not good. The oily rag buckets on fire. Oops.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:42:08):
But here I want to challenge you a little bit. A task is something you not forget. Isn’t the group chat enough for those type of things
Tom Dorsey (00:42:19):
In general? And it would be because you want to include the text, but just on you could
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:42:26):
Just create a group chat and say, Hey guys, clean shop.
Mike Holmes (00:42:30):
I’m thinking the task is to remind me to send that group text.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:42:35):
Oh, I see.
Tom Dorsey (00:42:37):
I know. Another good one. I know another good one. What about pushing sales drivers reminder to offer some specific the financing or the warranty or whatever it might be as just kind of reminders to your sales team?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:42:55):
Yeah, long-term calendar events which then trigger a task maybe the day before and then on the same day I liked it a lot.
Tom Dorsey (00:43:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just reinforcement of some objectives and customize ’em, make ’em as customizable as necessary so that don’t forget to upsell the windshield wiper blades or whatever. But yeah, I mean there’s so many possibilities and actually needing areas for improvement in kind of how the traditional communication and processes. It’s funny, I’ve been in shops since almost like the wild west. You get a completely different experience standing on this side of the counter than you do on that side of the counter. And it’s kind of interesting how that can develop because they seem to be pretty close together
Mike Holmes (00:43:53):
And going to the new TPX is very similar to that. It’s all the same, but it’s different. The benefit benefits, just the task is enough to warrant change. And I know we may not even supposed to touch on it, but there’s so many other improvements in things in the TPX that it, it’s a time saver in itself just with the other things that are in there. You can spend more time on it, but once you get it set up integrated as the task, the task will even remember your top 10 task. So you don’t have to keep repeating, you can just select,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:44:39):
Right.
Mike Holmes (00:44:42):
I think that was one thing that the turbo guys lot on and asked for is one time in the old chat you had the chats that they saved. You could make free determined chats where you didn’t have to type it every time and that’s where that came from, where it saves the top 10 and you can don’t have to retype it, you just copy and keep on going.
Bill Connor (00:45:07):
So we maybe should go ahead and touch on a little bit of some of the stuff that we used to force in the past. We now go ahead and don’t force that anymore. We create a task if it doesn’t get done. So you might want to talk about that a little bit for some of the shops that are changing. Oh, that’s
Tom Dorsey (00:45:21):
A great point, Bill.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:45:22):
Yes, yes, thank you. So I don’t know whether you guys remember, but we had a very busy Facebook forum discussion on the day when we started prompting popups to service advisors and said, review this inspection sheet right hell broke loose. So in our attempt to help service advisors felt intruded interrupted, whatever you want to call it. And what’s funny is in the meanwhile, so many people have gotten used to it. That’s just another the way it is, right? Change of habit kind of thing. You knew
Tom Dorsey (00:46:10):
All along, you knew that that was going to happen all along. We just have to get from A to B,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:46:14):
Right? But there are indeed circumstances under which in implicitly popping up pop up is just a nuisance and you just want to click it away because it doesn’t fit in your time schedule. So we thought, okay, let’s make it different. Instead of forcing people to do something, we just remind them immediately through the task manager chat, there’s something for you to do and remind again through the task manager at the top of the screen that you do that, right? So instead of forcing now somebody to now decide which inspection sheet needs to be reviewed and you cannot leave this thing other than unchecking the inspection sheet and maybe not sending it, we are now reminding people that’s the most direct example where we took out forcing people to do something, service advisors in particular. Instead we replace it with a strong reminder and another reminder later if it has not been done. So the whole underlying concept also for the task manager,
Tom Dorsey (00:47:37):
Freedom, baby freedom.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:47:39):
Yes. Bill, do you want to add anything?
Bill Connor (00:47:42):
No. Well yeah, I do actually. So in the past when you move something from the no tech column to assign it to a technician, you got a popup that’s going to be there because that’s required. But maybe later on after you get an approval from a customer and it’s going to go to the same technician, we don’t show that box anymore. But if it’s going to a different technician and it’s not a sign, then that’s when a task is going to be created. So there’s a couple of times where we used to have popups that said do this. Now we want to make sure that a shop, it depends on their configuration, but we want to make sure that they know that if a task is created to make sure that they do it because it might be to go ahead and assign those jobs to a technician. So they get to working on it and they didn’t have that box now and they didn’t follow that. There’s a red number there that says come tap on me, do something with it. So we want to make sure nothing gets forgot that way also. So follow them number counts and make sure to use them.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (00:48:42):
Good point.
Tom Dorsey (00:48:47):
And so Bill, how do these people get a hold of this awesome new tool?
Bill Connor (00:48:54):
Well, the best thing to do is go ahead and talk with their trainer about it and the trainer will go ahead and ask them some questions, verify do they have the right monitors, are there tablets, right, and so on. And then they’re going to go ahead and send them a link that says, Hey, watch this video so you can learn about the changes from standard to TVPX and then they’re going to go ahead and give you a link to a demo shop. You need to go into that demo shop and go through and do some of the things you just learned on the video. Go ahead. It’s going to create a repair order for you. You’re going to open that repair order up, you’re going to do some editing. You’re going to go through and do what you need, send it to yourself, look and see how it looks, and use the guided help that’s built into the tool so after you, they can verify that everything is set to go, then they’ll get back with you, they’ll set a launch date for you and you get an email with your welcome codes and it’s time to go to work on the new highly advanced system,
Tom Dorsey (00:49:53):
But not in a scary advanced way.
Bill Connor (00:49:56):
Nope. It’s actually everything that they’ve, to me, it’s like in a shop, you got this scan tool with the lab scope built into it you’ve used for 10 years, you know need to update and it’s going to be better when you update, but you’re going to do the same job with a different tool that’s brand new. There’s going to be some things that are different, but you’ll get used to it really quick and there’s huge benefits of just diving in there and getting it done.
Tom Dorsey (00:50:19):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Most of the stuff that you’ve been doing a long time and it’s all the same, just different shades of colors. There are some new things and there’s plenty of videos and episodes like this out there to help you, but like Bill said, we’ve got the training wheel environment in there. You can get in there and try to break it and push the buttons and just see how everything functions and do your normal tasks and you can rotate your staff through there so they get an experience in there as well and they know what to expect when they get their switch done and just like that, you’re ready to operate Monday morning
Bill Connor (00:50:59):
And to help being built right into the tool. You hit the blue question, you don’t know something, hover over it and read it. If that don’t be enough, hit the blue question, hover over it again, learn more. So it’s built right into tool. You don’t have to go looking for anywhere else to get the information from.
Tom Dorsey (00:51:14):
Yeah. Hey Mike, how’s that working for you guys? Are you guys, are they using the guided help? Are they interacting in the tool through those features and what’s the feedback that they’re giving you about that stuff? Oh, it looks like we got Mike muted. There we go.
Mike Holmes (00:51:45):
The guided feature, once we get it fully implemented is going to make the most consistency of anything that I think AutoVitals has done. It’s retraining your techs, but it’s going to make everything 1, 2, 3, 4. There’s not going to be opportunities to deviate too much. We’ve gotten the most pushback from that probably anything we’ve done because you know how techs are, they weren’t done their way, but the opportunity to have that consistency is going to make it a lot easier for the service advisors. The issue that we’re running into right now, and I’ll just be honest, we’re so busy, we’re booking so far ahead, we’re skeptical about getting additional work that needs to be done because a lots of the people say when they see it that way, they want to do it now and we don’t have time to do it. So we’re trying to work through that, but I think the guided is going to be one of the biggest improvements as far as the inspections and you can just see the number of clicks that it’s going to reduce.
(00:53:00):
I think there was account where it reduced your clicks by a hundred and even during one of our discussions it was challenged by one of the other turbo shops and went through the process and there’s a lot of clicks that reduced. It’s very well set up already, but it’s also tweakable and that’s the stage we’re at is we want to tweak it a little bit. We want to make it ours and so we’re trying to work through that, but they’ll come a day when Monday morning, guys, this is the way you’re going to do it. I don’t care. You’re going to do it this way and if you stick with it, the benefit is going to be tremendous, but my plan is to wait until it slows down a little bit and we get past all of the busyness of this time of year. That’s my personal thought and I think some of the people that have made that commitment will reassure that and reaffirm
Tom Dorsey (00:53:57):
Yeah, yeah, to your point, right? It’s teaching the old dogs some new tricks, but boy, those new tricks are fun sometimes. And we’ve had several of those shops, the feedback is exactly that is, oh man, they push back and they didn’t want to, then I kind of force it now they won’t turn it off right now because like you said, it’s a lot less clicks, it’s much more efficient, they get it done quicker and more consistent. It saves time at the counter as well with the edits and once you see that dynamic, it’s an easy decision. And we have on the other side of that too, is the help. Are you guys hitting that blue question mark and going in and using the help notes and videos in there so that they get comfortable with the layout of the TVPX?
Mike Holmes (00:55:03):
I am sorry, were you asking me or
Tom Dorsey (00:55:04):
Yeah, I’m sorry, Mike, I thought you were muted.
Mike Holmes (00:55:07):
They brought that other screen up and see, it distracted me when they brought that screen up about polling. So I was reading the Oh yeah,
Tom Dorsey (00:55:13):
Yeah,
Mike Holmes (00:55:16):
Maybe some of the discussion was not.
Tom Dorsey (00:55:20):
Yeah, I was asking you about that little big question mark because we got two kind of versions, right? The guided is going to walk you through doing a perfect inspection every time, but then the help, the onboard help is really a great tool, especially when you first get switched over to Thet VPX. Yeah, you’re going to go through the demo stuff, but you’re probably going to miss some stuff and then have some questions. Well, you simply click that blue question mark, it turns it into help mode. Now when you hover over or click oh, if we can just put Dustin, if you can put Bill’s screen, full screen, he’s going to show a little walkthrough here.
Mike Holmes (00:55:54):
You’re right. It’s very quick, easy. And you’re only looking for where you’re stumped at that time. Exactly. You just scroll through to find, build some shift.
Bill Connor (00:56:08):
This is the on off toggle switch and then whatever you want to know about you just hover over the top of it. It’s got the information there. If you want to learn more about it, you click here, it goes into more information, you can go ahead and rate it, tell us whether that solved your problem or not. And if it didn’t go deep enough, please go ahead and come down in here and put a note here and saying, Hey, I really need to know more about this and here’s why. And we’ll not only update it for you, but we’ll update it for everybody else. So there’s any place you go and see this question mark in here. It’s an on off toggle switch. So first line of defense is hover over something and get the tool tip feedback. If that’s not enough, go ahead and click on the blue question mark, hover over it and get the information and keep going from there. So it’s just build into the tool so you don’t have to go looking for it or phone a friend or anything else.
Mike Holmes (00:56:56):
Yeah, I found myself, I have to be careful when I go to look at one particular issue as I’m going back with the cursor to turn it off, I’ll see something that I didn’t know it would do that or I see an explanation so I’m stopping. I’m in that rabbit hole of different things. So I have to be very conscious that I need to look at this one item and get back to what I was doing.
Tom Dorsey (00:57:24):
That’s great. No, that’s a great testimonial to the effectiveness of that because as you all know, there’s a lot of functionality inside of AutoVitals and a lot of times you think and it’s working well for you and you’re using it and it’s awesome, but boy, it does a lot more and you find that stuff and so it wouldn’t urge just go through and kind of click once you get it in your hands, go through and read all the help stuff. And to Mike’s point is that it allows you to go right to what you need help with right now instead of sitting and watching some 30 minute video where you just remember 15 minutes, seconds of, I should say, right, and then you have to watch it again or try to scroll through some video to find a spot and how frustrating that is.
(00:58:11):
You go straight to the information that you need and you get it like that and it gives you the ability. So for everybody who went out there and said, well, we need more training, and if they would’ve had this in the training, it would’ve been so much better. Well now you get to leave us that feedback and then we’ll get right in there and update that and incorporate if it makes any sense, if your feedback is worth the digits it was written in. No, I’m just kidding. Of course your feedback’s important to us, but we will implement it into there so it’ll help other people through that help functionality as well.
Mike Holmes (00:58:50):
Whenever me and Bill are talking, if you have him on the phone for an hour, you’re actually drinking through the fire hose.
Tom Dorsey (00:58:58):
You sure are.
Mike Holmes (00:59:00):
He’s got so much knowledge and he does it repetitive. So he knows what works and that’s what he’s going to tell you. You can’t remember it all, but sometimes you’ll be looking for something and you’ll remember that help button and you can go there, he’s probably showed it to you that way you can go back to it and then it’ll reinforce or remind you of what you did. And after you have to do that two or three times, it’s just second nature, you could be using it for your service advisors or whoever you’re trying to school up on those items.
Bill Connor (00:59:33):
So I normally start out every phone call with, remember this should be quizzed at a later date either by me or somebody else. So having it in the tool is good. So my big takeaway on this is go and be proactive rather than reactive. Use that today’s vehicle page not only on the red, green and yellow bars, but look at them number counts in there and make sure you manage them and keep ’em down that way instead of letting flyers flare up where you got to rebuild them relationship with the customer or vendors or whatever. Everything is just right there ready to go.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:03):
Yeah, no, and that’s the trifecta right there. You drink through the fire hose with Bill, you use the task manager to put down the highlights and the things that you know need to learn more about or take an action on. And then you get into that help functionality to figure out what the heck Bill was talking about and how it relates to you and what you do about it. And then you give him feedback through there. Or as a matter of fact, when the next check-in while he is rating you for not doing it is the Bill way, then you can go in and say, well, that online help or the onboard help should have had this additional information in there. And then he can get in there and update it for you.
Mike Holmes (01:00:42):
Maybe Bill can send the task and put it on my task manager for
Tom Dorsey (01:00:45):
Me. Exactly. Exactly. Well that’s another good one.
Bill Connor (01:00:51):
Maybe we should take the task from the BCP and put ’em in the task.
Tom Dorsey (01:00:57):
I was just going to say now that would be the evil genius, mad scientist connection that we need right there is to be able to push that BCP task and data directly into the task manager and direct it of course with permission at the individual roles and not just the implementer Well, gosh, it’s top of the hour. Sorry guys. Real quick. I want to get what Tony’s saying. Tony Fendberg says, TVPX is amazing, but when converting it, it’s important to let new users know that there could be issues with integration with their point of sale. We experienced a lot of frustration with text not getting tiles, and so that’s part of it too. To Bill’s point, what you need do to get it done is make sure that your point of sale is supported. We’re kind of ramping it out by point of sale as we go and in there working with Mike and the other turbo shops and those folks that are switching over to identify those areas and make sure that we get the transition as smooth as possible and the functionality a hundred percent right out of the gate so that you get a great experience on the transition there and you get to take advantage of and speed that’s built in performance just in the new platform as well as the added functionality and features that we’ve been discussing today.
(01:02:29):
Mikey, I can’t thank you much, buddy, enough for coming on and sharing that with us. How much work you guys are doing from a turbo perspective and really helping everybody out there by working with Bill and Uwe and Carlo and everybody to get that functionality built in and ready for the masses. And thank you again also for coming on the show and sharing that with us is great to have you on and to see you. Looking forward to seeing you soon, buddy. Hope we have that conference again and you’re coming out.
Mike Holmes (01:03:03):
Oh, it’s my pleasure. You’re welcome to come to Florida. You see the beach, so
Tom Dorsey (01:03:07):
Man. I know buddy. I wish I was on a plane.
Mike Holmes (01:03:12):
Maybe not. Maybe not.
Tom Dorsey (01:03:15):
Oh, it’s nice.
(01:03:17):
It’s been gloomy here. I don’t like it. I don’t want to get in the sun. I’m losing my tan, just pink. I look like a shaved hamster. Well, semi shaved hamster. As always, all of your help and your mastery is critical for, and it’s helping a lot of folks and preparing ’em for the Tbp X switch. Welcome back buddy. Welcome back from your Yosemite Whitewater rafting experience. Glad you survived, so that you can continue to bring the rest of that genius plan to fruition. Thank you for coming on the show, buddy. Thank you, Dustin. As always, you are awesome. Thank you very much for manning behind the scenes. He’s like Doctor, he’s like the Wizard of Oz back there behind the curtain and tune in next Wednesday, same time, same place. We’re going to do it again and if you’ve got any suggestions or there’s anything specific solutions you want us to talk about or you want to come on the show, reach out to us and let us know. Until then, make sure you get registered so you get the notifications and subscribe to and you get the recording sent to you directly. We’ll see you next Wednesday. Thanks again.
Bill Connor (01:04:38):
Bye all.