The Autowork Online garage management solution’s new Work in Progress (WIP) feature allows you to easily view and manage the status of the jobs relevant to you. WIP features a fully customisable interface, featuring job role-specific views.
Current jobs are sorted into a series of columns for specific job statuses, allowing users to see exactly what stage every job is currently at.
Views can be created specifically for particular job roles, allowing for both high-level job overviews, and detailed work breakdowns.
Changing the status of a job is as simple as dragging and dropping it from one column to another.
Last time we looked at how to set up Autowork Online’s Work in Progress feature, now we’re going to go through how you can actually use it. The Work in Progress feature can be used to view the status of currently outstanding work, and can vastly improve the workflow and efficiency of your workshop.
As we talked about last time, you can select the template based on your job role. So we’ve got a few set up here:
The most basic of these is the Workshop manager, this shows just a basic overview of every job, but does not go into much detail. It would allow the manager to view what is happening at a glance. If you want to get more information, you can drill down further. For example if we hover over this job, we can see that it is awaiting start because it’s pending the workshop, and we double click it, we can view even more details and even open the job.
The next template is the Service adviser template, this goes into a little more detail, for example, we can see that three jobs are going to start today and are confirmed, one has been rebooked, one’s pending workshop, one car’s currently on the ramp being worked on, and two jobs are on hold awaiting parts.
Another view that we’ve got set up is the Technician view, this is almost as detailed as the Service adviser’s view, but shows slightly different statuses. For example, it does not show which vehicles are due in today, just which ones are pending workshop or awaiting inspection.
The last and most simple view is the Valeting view, this simply shows work complete, and a list of cars that are ready to be valeted.
Now I’m going to show you some example workflows for the Work in Progress screen, so you can get a better idea of how it can be used.
So this customer’s Audi A4 has come in, so we’re going to book it in and mark it as awaiting inspection. So all we need to do is simply click and drag the job from the confirmed status onto the awaiting inspection one. That’s it, as simple as that! The status of that job has now been updated automatically, and everyone else who uses this view will be able to see that it is awaiting inspection.
So now we’re going to switch to the Technician’s view. We can see that this job is now visible to the Technician, where it previously wasn’t. The Technician has taken a look at the car, and he’s decided that he can start work on the service. So again, he just simply clicks and drags the job from the awaiting inspection status to on ramp.
So now we’re going to move back to the Service adviser’s view, as you can see, the Audi has moved to On Ramp here too. If we double click it, we can view further information, so we can see that the customer has asked us to wash this car when we’re finished. If we click Open, we can view the job in the document screen as well for even more information.
So now we’re going to return to the Technician’s view, as the work on that vehicle is complete. As the work is complete, it needs to be checked, so we’re going to move it onto the Quality Control status.
Now that the work’s been checked over by a more senior technician, we’re going to move it onto the Work Complete status to show this.
Now we’ll move back to the Service Adviser, who’s going to update the job and mark the vehicle as Off Site, because the customer has come to pick it up. All you need to do is double click the job, and then click the Mark Off Site button. As you can see, this has now been removed completely from the Work in Progress screen, as the vehicle has been booked off site.
As you can see, this vehicle has a Valeting option set on it, if we move this vehicle directly through to Work Complete, this will also add it to the Ready for Valeting queue. If we go into the view for the Valeting department they’ll be able to see this as well. When the valeting has been completed, the Valeting team will pass the keys back to the Service Adviser and advise him of this. All the Service Adviser needs to do now is double click the job and click the Valet Complete button. This will mark that the valeting has been completed and remove it from the ready for Valeting list, although it still shows in the Work Completed list as it’s still on site.
