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.

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.

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 Service Estimates on PDAs

I attended the NADA (national auto dealers association) conference a couple of weeks ago and met with a number of large paintless dent repair franchises. They were very interested in our FieldSync Automotive software application for the PDR industry. This application runs on mobile handheld devices and allows the service technician to complete all of their inspections, service estimates and work orders on the handheld device and synchronize the data with the office accounting system or work order system.

While attending the NADA conference, I learned about some work flow processes that we are now adding to the FieldSync Automotive application. Often the service technician will inspect a number of vehicles at the sames time and create a list of estimates. Once the inspections and estimates are completed, the service technician will meet with the auto dealership manager and review the service time and costs estimates associated with each car and decide if the services are necessary and justified. We are adding a view that allows all of the estimates to be on one list and screen. Just tap the specific estimate and it opens. This allows you to quickly review all open estimates, edit them, approve them and move to the services phase.

MobileDataforce offers both customized and out-of-the-box mobile software applications for the PDR industry. These mobile applications synchronize with the software in your office called FieldSync Manager which integrates directly with QuickBooks and other accounting applications.

Paintless Dent Repair & Auto Interiors on Handheld Computers

My sales team just returned from the Mobile Tech Expo in Florida. We learned that our mobile software for paintless dent repair companies was very much in demand. There were many times when we would have a dozen companies surrounding our booth and asking questions about our mobile software solutions.

We also learned a few things that we need to add. We need to develop a version of our FieldSync Automotive that addresses the specific needs of mobile techs that focus on repairing the interiors of cars. My team is already working on that now. This image shows how you can click on a specific area of the interior and associate an inspection and service with it. Call us at 208-384-1200 or email us if you would like more information.

Mobile Tech Expo - Paintless Dent Repair Software

My team at MobileDataforce will be attending the Mobile Tech Expo2008 in beautiful Clearwater, Florida on January 17th-19th. We will have a booth and will be demonstrating our mobile and desktop software designed to manage paintless dent repair services businesses.

Our solution for paintless dent repair services companies is called FieldSync Automotive and more information is available here.

If you would like to speak to a representative please call 208-384-1200 or for email click here.

VIN Decoding for Paintless Dent Repair Services

MobileDataforce has developed a technology that allows most any bar code scanner to capture the VIN (vehicle identification number) of an automobile. The significance of this technology is that you can easily capture the 17 digit number, uniquely identify the vehicle, automatically bring up the description of the automobile on your handheld PDA, inspect it and get approval from your customer to work on it.

One of the biggest complaints auto dealers have against PDR companies is duplicate billing. For some reason auto dealers do not like paying twice for work done. They want accurate billing that can be verified by using the VIN to uniquely identify vehicles, approvals and work completed for invoicing.

Growing and Scaling a Paintless Dent Repair Business with Mobile Technologies

One of the biggest challenges a small paintless dent repair business has is growing beyond the a single owner/manager. The owner/manager has a passion for building the PDR business and providing the very best services possible to please the customer and grow the business. The owner/manager paces the floor at night thinking through all the business processes, customer service issues, sales, marketing and accounting processes. Often times an employee does not have this same level of commitment.

As the PDR owner/manager begins to hire additional service technicians to expand the number of customers and locations that can be serviced, quality assurance, and effective business processes quickly become a problem. How do you ensure that you aren't immediately buried in paper, duplicate billing disputes, late payment issues, customer complaints, payroll confusion, etc. These are the problems that often stop small PDR businesses from expanding.


Deploying a field services management application in the office that synchronizes with a mobile handheld computer is a very effective tool for helping to ensure a quality and controlled growth pattern. One can answer calls, dispatch work orders and synchronize completed work orders for instant invoicing all from a PDA. New services can be dispatched, work completed and invoiced, again from the handheld computer. When the handheld computer is synchronized all of this information is immediately imported into the accounting system in the office.

The key to managed quality and growth is to automate the business processes. Take out the uncontrolled human factors. Mobile handheld applications can direct the user to complete the forms correctly. They can alert managers when incomplete processes or data is submitted. There are all tools for assuring quality in the field.

MobileDataforce's FieldSync Automotive is a good example of this kind of solution in action.