The idea behind mirroring technology is to study how people and vehicles move through your service department. You already do this observation instinctively. You watch what your people are doing. You notice a vehicle sitting in a staging area for too long. You see which advisors relate well with customers and whose product sales and profitability set them apart.
What you cannot see within these activities and movements is the under-use of time. But when you can observe and track time gaps and efficiency losses and respond quickly, you can salvage efficiencies and unrealized unapplied time losses.
As a cycle time management tool, mirroring acts as a real-time service coordinator, ensuring every step in the vehicle service process flows smoothly — from Write-Up to Staging to Service Bay to Completion and beyond.
With automated step-to-step handoffs, the system instantly notifies the right employee when a vehicle is ready to move to the next stage. Whether alerting a technician that a vehicle is prepped for service or notifying the service advisor that it’s ready for customer delivery, your team stays synchronized and on-task — eliminating delays and bottlenecks.
Think of it as a fast, precise, and effortless digital baton pass that keeps vehicles and communication moving at the speed of service.
Enabling this vision – seeing what competitors cannot in their service workflow – is a technology that mirrors your service workflows. This mirroring is a digital twin of your service processes, service write-up to staging, in-bay, service complete, and vehicle delivery to the customer.
With such a digital twin of your actual service workflows on your phone or computer, you know at a glance whether processes are flowing as designed, if a vehicle has been sitting in a staging area for too long, and how timely one phase of work is being completed and moved into the next phase, and where or who may need support to ensure your delivery promise is fulfilled.
While somewhat new to dealership service fulfillment, mirroring is used successfully with major agriculture equipment manufacturers. Using this strategy through their component delivery and final assembly, production increases by two additional daily units, adding an extra $2 million in otherwise unrealized productivity.
A physical mirror reflects the data points of one’s visage to one’s eyes, translating light data into an image of oneself. Applied to industry, this innovative technology is known as Microsoft Fabric Mirroring. It’s said to “bridge the gap between data and action, empowering organizations to pivot swiftly, adapt, and thrive.” That, too, is the action you want in an efficient workflow.
This process uses GPS and Bluetooth - like hang tag trackers attached to the rearview mirrors of vehicles moving through your shop. It constantly feeds time and location and relays data to the fixed operations director’s computer and cell phone.
Mirrored service workflow delivers knowledge of:
• Advisor efficiency and customer engagement balance
• Parts deliveries and technician times
• Technician time lost to scouting their next job on the lot or elsewhere
• Tracking the location of vehicle keys
• Workflow knowledge of reconditioning processes
• Inventory visualization in interactive formats across digital maps.
• After-hour vehicle movements, when and what vehicles are out for test drives, and when returned to the dealership, improving asset security and time management.
This mirrored inventory produces at-a-glance insights into inventory age, popularity, and movement patterns. You can access this control on any device. Customized alerts mean specific events like low battery charge, prolonged vehicle inactivity, and unauthorized movement tell you for quick response to protect these assets:
• Assess if this workflow is as productive and profitable as it could/should be. From key to key, what does the data of your mirrored workflow tell you? Are advi-sors spending more time on data entry than engaging with customers? On average, how long do completed vehicles wait post-service until the owner is notified, whether waiting or via text message? Would reducing this gap benefit CSI and service retention?
• Know where this workflow costs you billable time. From key to key, where does the workflow hang up or stall? What might be a better outcome if these road-blocks were eliminated? Is an 8-minute time savings per advisor across 18 write-ups per day meaningful?Could eliminating vehicle searches for technicians reduce frustration and convert that lost time into recovered unbillable hours? Our analysis shows that, on average, cycle time management tools can help service departments add recovered billable hours to their day’s work. These lost billable minutes total 45 minutes per maintenance service. Recovering these 45 minutes on each service across 10 jobs per day can add 7.5 extra billable hours daily.
• Analyze time data to pinpoint specific days or times that consistently experience longer service times. From key to key, know your workload and scheduling opportunities. Manage around heavy appointment times or keep technicians busier during lax periods of the day. From key to key, know the details of every phase of the service experience. Now, scheduling can set appointments around these heavy times or fill in less active hours to keep techs working.
Know how and where minor workflow improvements yield results. With a digital mirror of physical service department workflows feeding real-time data to a desktop or smartphone, service directors see how small movements of assets, people, and processes can pinpoint key-to-key promise delays and other obstacles, putting delivery promises at risk.
Mirrored workflow tracking solutions are unique because they show the fixed operations director how work processes and people flow into and out of the service functions. It informs you of why and where the workflow is delayed and why it is.
A physician’s examination is helpful, but an MRI is specific. All people see. The advantage is to see how. Mirrored service workflow technology gives you that.
Colin McElhatton is the founder and CEO of Mobile Dealer Data. This cloud-based productivity company uses real-time location technology to improve time and asset management for dealership service departments, reconditioning operations, inventory management, and vehicle key management.
He can be reached at colin@mdd.io.
Visit https://mdd.io/
