Pub. 1 2011 Issue 4

8 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com C onsider that even today, entrenched at the core of many service operations, lies the most inef- ficient of tools: pen and paper. More specifically, the Appointment Book and Route Sheet are still occupying much needed space on many service desks all across the country. While great improvements have been made with the pen and paper since the first Curved Dash Oldsmobile rolled off the line, technological developments have long ago rendered them obsolete. Electronic Appointments and Repair Order (RO) Management tools are vastly improved replacements that are most likely already installed and available, as they are an integral part of many Dealership Management Systems. Sometimes, people do things because that’s the way they’ve always done them. Why change? For starters, here are ten good reasons why service departments should consider throwing away the Appointment Book and Route Sheet for good: Electronic Appointments allow the user to easily attach requested services to existing customer data, reducing the time needed to create an appointment. Modifications are also easy; just pull up the appoint- ment in the service module and modify the date, time, requested service etc. In the Appointment Book, the user has to scratch out or erase the appointment, then write the whole thing over on the new date or time. Electronic Appointments and RO Management can be made available from ANY workstation. This eliminates the need for employees to run to the service desk to create appointments or push fellow employees out of the way in order to update an RO status. State- ments such as “Where’s the Appointment Book?” and “It was here a minute ago”, would be fond anecdotal recollections. It is much less common for a worksta- tion to go missing than the Appointment Book. Converting a system appointment to an RO is ex- tremely fast with an ROManagement tool, requiring only a few clicks from start to finish. With an Ap- pointment Book, the information must be manually replicated onto an RO. When using a Route Sheet, all holdovers must be Reasons Why Service Departments Should Throw Away Their Appointment Book and Route Sheets BY GREG VRIGIAN Old habits die hard, in spite of all the recent technological advances and ‘best practices’ designed to increase productivity and profitability.