Paintless Dent Repair Technologies for Building a Business

Managing and building a Paintless Dent Repair business is hard. Even if you are a very talented service technician yourself, how do you grow your business beyond your 24 hours in a day? It takes thinking about how to scale your business in advance of the need. There are a few things you can do to ensure your business can grow in the future.

1. Document the processes for estimating a job
2. Document the processes for scheduling work
3. Document the list and brand of tools that should be used with vendor contact information and costs
4. Document the processes for invoicing for work completed
5. Document how you will collect payment
6. Document hiring requirements
7. Document a marketing plan for attracting new business - list all marketing strategies and efforts so each can be reviewed
8. Learn from the large PDR franchises - how did they grow?
9. Automate and mobilize as much of business processes as you can.
10. Can work be dispatched to remote service technicians with a smartphone?
11. Can completed work be synchronized via a smart phone back to the office?
12. Can you complete your service orders on a smart phone and print on a mobile printer?
13. Can all dispatches and completed service orders be sychronized directly to your accounting software?
14. Can job estimates be completed on your smartphone?

These are just a few of the things you want to consider. Each help enable a business that can scale in size. I don't mean to suggest the above items are necessary to start a business on day one, but they will be quickly be needed if the business will grow profitably.

Let's spend a minute discussing the growth challenges. Soon after you begin hiring service technicians getting accurate and completed service orders back to the office in a timely manner will become a problem. Why? It just happens. Service technicians are not born administrators. Getting accurate and profitable job estimates out of your new estimator is also an issue.

Once paper work begins to stack-up in the office with incomplete fields, inaccurate information and missing job estimates you will begin to pull your hair out. Do you hire more managers? If you do - your profit disappears. What are your options? I would seriously encourage you to look for a mobile application designed specifically for Paintless Dent Repair businesses. One that will enable all the work to be completed accurately in the field and synchronized directly to your office accounting software.

Paper Forms & Paintless Dent Repair Businesses

When PDR (paintless dent repair) companies have a central office and remote service technicians in the field, the delivery of paper forms in a timely fashion can often become a big challenge.

As mentioned in an previous blog article, there are a number of common paper forms that often need to be filled out and submitted:

• Vehicle Inspection form
• Job estimate in a form acceptable to the customer
• Job estimate acceptance form and signature from the customer
• Work Order/Service Ticket assigned to a specific service technician
• Hiring a service technician and completing the hiring documentation
• Documenting the work (to the customer's standards)
• Submitting the completed work order to the customer for payment (in the proper format)
• Payroll and compensation paperwork for the service technician associated with a specific vehicle and work order

How do you keep all of this paperwork organized? It's not easy!!! This paperwork must be transported, submitted, signed, entered into a computer system, filed, etc. Multiply this effort by a dozen locations, or even hundreds of locations and it can be a daunting task.

This is one of the biggest justifications for automating and mobilizing these processes with rugged handheld computers that synchronize directly with the office.

If you would like to discuss automating and mobilizing your PDR business, or mobile automotive services business please email, or visit MobileDataforce's website.

Paper Processing and Growing Paintless Dent Repair Business

MobileDataforce has worked with many PDR (paintless dent repair) companies that have experienced challenges with processing paperwork. Why? Often the work is performed in remote and mobile locations by people without years of experience, far from the accounting systems, managers and administrative staff. Here is some of the paperwork involved:

• Creating a job estimate on a unique vehicle acceptable to the customer
• Getting the job estimate approved by the dealer/customer
• Assigning the work to a specific service technician
• Hiring a service technician and completing the documentation
• Documenting the work (to the customer's standards)
• Submitting the completed work to the customer for payment (in the proper format)
• Paying the service technician for the work associated with a specific vehicle

This process may happen hundreds or thousands of times per day across a wide geographic region. How does the central office collect, enter and review all of this paperwork to ensure accuracy? How do managers keep all of the correct business processes happening in the field? How do you ensure quality and professionalism when there is significant staff turn-over? How do you keep your customers happy?

Many of these issues can be avoided, or eliminated by using an automated system on a rugged handheld computer at the point-of-work. The handheld computer application can step each service technician systematically through the correct business processes. The handheld solution can inform the service technician how things need to be completed, provide additional audio and video examples, and alert when something has been done incorrectly. The information entered in the field, at the point-of-work, can be synchronized with headquarters and reviewed by management in near real time. This is how companies can ensure quality, consistency and the ability to scale up their business.

MobileDataforce has developed the FieldSync Automotive solution that addresses many of these issues.

Auto Lease Return Inspection Software

MobileDataforce regularly works with companies that need a mobile software application for inspecting vehicles that are returned after their lease contracts expire. These companies often need the following:

1. Identify the vehicle
2. Inspect the vehicle
3. Identify the location and describe any damage
4. Gain approval to repair the damage at the estimated levels
5. Schedule repairs
6. Complete repairs
7. Invoice the appropriate parties

Most often this work is completed in an environment that benefits from being able to complete these business processes on a rugged mobile handheld computer.

MobileDataforce has a variety of mobile software applications for the automotive industry designed to meet these needs.

PDR and Working with Auto Dealers

My team is developing a mobile software application for a large Toyota auto dealer. They want to track the status of all used automobiles in the following manner:

1. inventory each vehicle and apply a dealership barcode label to the window
2. inspect each vehicle
3. identify work that is needed to be performed
4. assign service technicians to complete the work
5. track each vehicle and its work status
6. Provide a management view of the work on a website
7. complete a quality assurance inspection of all work completed

One of the biggest challenges the dealership faced was the process of identifying the status of a large number of vehicles in a lot and keeping everything organized. My team (at MobileDataforce) developed mobile handheld software applications that allowed each of these processes to be completed using mobile handheld computers.

Teph Seal, Paintless Dent Repair & Mobile PDA Solutions

Integrated Solutions magazine's front page article this month (June 2008) is on the subject of using mobile technology and handheld computers to grow a large paintless dent repair business.

Gain Business Control (in a PDR business) With Mobile Computing

This 2,000-employee auto detailing company used a wireless handheld computing solution to regulate service processes for its regional workers, leading to 100% billing accuracy.

MobileDataforce provided the mobile software technology for this solution.

ROI for Mobilizing Paintless Dent Repair Businesses

This article, published in the May 2008 edition of Integrated Solutions magazine, discusses in detail the need and value of mobilizing paintless dent repair businesses.

Teph Seal identifies the following problems with using a paper based manual system for documenting field services:

This manual system posed several problems for Teph Seal. First, human error resulted in billing inaccuracies that cost the company thousands of dollars in revenue on a monthly basis. For example, an employee could easily record a VIN incorrectly on the log form. When this occurred, a dealer would deny ownership of the vehicle referenced and refuse to pay for the services provided. Similarly, employees would also accidentally record data for the same vehicle twice, causing the client to be double-billed.

Another problem resulted from the slow process of physically transporting data in paper form. “Between the dealership, the regional VPs’ desks, and the ultimate arrival of the service spreadsheets at the corporate office, there were multiple places where the data we needed to bill the customer could be lost, misplaced, or held up,” says John Tricoli, president of Teph Seal. “Corporate accounting employees used to make dozens of calls every week trying to track down paperwork we needed to bill our customers. This created delays in our billing cycle that negatively impacted our cash flow.”

A final weakness of the manual system was that it allowed individual Teph Seal employees to take liberties with company processes. For example, Teph Seal managers at individual dealerships would sometimes ignore the established corporate rates for services and negotiate their own pricing with the dealership. This practice often resulted in billing discrepancies and unmet customer expectations. Furthermore, since payroll was done by hand, dealership managers could easily fudge the number of hours an employee worked, enabling themselves and other employees to be overpaid.

MobileDataforce provided the mobile software solution for Teph Seal's large paintless dent repair business.

Hail and Paintless Dent Repair

My team at MobileDataforce has been very busy helping paintless dent repair companies mobilize their work order dispatch, inspection, estimate and invoicing processes for the "hail" season. Our mobile software solutions for the field service technicians are very useful when large numbers of vehicles must be identified, sorted and serviced in a short amount of time. The less paper work, the faster the process can be completed and the work invoiced.

Paintless Dent Repair and QuickBooks

Most of our PDR (paintless dent repair) customers use QuickBooks as their office accounting software. For that reason, we have integrated the FieldSync Automotive application including the PDR auto inspection, mobile invoicing/service ticket application for handheld PDAs with QuickBooks. This allows for PDR companies to complete mobile service tickets on handheld computers in the field and immediately synchronize all the information with QuickBooks in the office. No more re-typing paper forms at a later time.

IBM and MobileDataforce for Mobile Software Applications

MobileDataforce has recently completed a mobile software development project that integrates the PointSync Mobility Platform with IBM's Maximo application. This project was developed by MobileDataforce and completed in Australia and implemented in both Australia and New Zealand. Our customer is a very large engineering and construction firm that works throughout the Asia/Pacific region.

The software application is a mobile work order management application.