Here is a small, expensive thing that happens in workshops every week.
A car comes in on Tuesday and needs a part you do not have. It goes on order. The customer is told Friday, probably. The car sits outside, or goes home and comes back, and the job sits in the system marked as waiting.
The part arrives on Thursday morning. Whoever takes the delivery signs for it, checks it against the note, puts it on the shelf. Correct in every respect.
Nobody tells the job.
So the car is still waiting on Thursday afternoon. Still waiting Friday morning, until someone planning the day happens to walk past the shelf, sees it, and says the words that cost you a day: "how long has that been there?"
The bay was free, the part was in, and nothing moved
What makes this one worth writing about is that no individual did anything wrong.
The person who booked in the delivery did their job. The person planning the workload did theirs, using the information in front of them, which said the job was waiting. The technician was available. The part was in the building. The only thing missing was a connection between two facts that lived in two different places.
This is the shape of most workshop delays. Not somebody being slow, but information arriving somewhere that could not act on it.
And it compounds. The bay sits empty or gets filled with something less profitable. The customer rings to chase and gets told it has not come in, which is now untrue. If the car went home, it has to come back again, which is a second visit you are paying for.
Booking in the delivery should close the loop
The fix is to make the delivery the event that updates the job, rather than a separate piece of admin that happens near it.
In Vehiso, when a part was ordered for a specific job, booking in the delivery tops up that job card line. Not a notification somebody has to notice. The line on the job goes from short to covered, and if that was the only thing the job was waiting for, the Awaiting parts status clears by itself.
Which means that on Thursday morning, the act of receiving the box is also the act of releasing the car. The person who plans the workload opens the list and the job is no longer sitting under waiting. Nobody had to walk past the shelf.
The status is the important half. A job that is short of a part says so, on the job, where the people planning the week look. Not in a comment box, not in somebody's head, not on a sticky note on a key hook.
Partly delivered is a real state
Factors deliver what they have, not what you ordered, and a system that only understands "ordered" and "arrived" will be wrong most of the week.
So a job that needs three parts and has received two stays in Awaiting parts. It clears when nothing is short, not when the first delivery lands. That sounds obvious written down and it is exactly where a simpler setup lets you down, because it declares the job ready and a technician gets halfway in before discovering otherwise.
A related piece of realism: over-receipt is allowed, with a warning rather than a refusal. You ordered four and the box holds five, because that is the pack. Refusing to book in what is physically on your shelf would just push the discrepancy into the next stock take, and that discrepancy is exactly what a movement history exists to prevent.
Purchase orders can also be closed short. If the factor is never sending the last one, you close the order at what actually arrived. What you cannot do is cancel an order that already has deliveries against it, because those parts are on your shelf and pretending the order never existed would break the ledger that explains them.
What it looks like across the week
Tuesday. Advisor adds the part to the job. Nothing free on the shelf, so the job moves to Awaiting parts and the part goes on a purchase order to the preferred supplier. The customer is told Friday.
Thursday. The van arrives. Whoever takes it books in the delivery against the order. The job card line is topped up, the job clears Awaiting parts, and the stock movement is recorded with what was actually paid.
Thursday, later. The job is in the ready list. A bay opens up at two and the car goes in a day early.
Friday. You ring the customer to say it is done, rather than to explain why it is not.
That last line is the actual product. Not a screen, not a report. One phone call that goes the other way.
The cost you are not counting
Most workshops do not have a figure for this, because the delay leaves no trace. The job eventually completes, the invoice is the same, and nothing in the accounts says a bay was empty on Thursday afternoon.
It shows up indirectly. In how many cars have to come back for a second visit. In how much of the week's capacity gets used. In how often customers are chasing you rather than the other way round, which is the quiet reputation cost that nobody puts a number on.
If you want to see it, the number to look at is not a parts number at all. It is how many jobs spent a day in Awaiting parts after the part was in the building.
If you buy everything per job
Plenty of workshops order every part for the job it is going on, hold nothing, and never have a part on a shelf that is not spoken for.
The status still earns its keep, because knowing which jobs are short is a planning problem rather than a stock problem. But most of the rest of this post is machinery for workshops with racking, and the part worth switching on for a per-job workshop is smaller and covered in you do not need a stores man to know what parts make you.
Where to go next
- The last cambelt kit: why two advisors sold the same part
- Eleven on the system, seven on the shelf
- What a part costs is not what you paid for it
- Introducing workshop management for car dealers and garages
Parts is included with Vehiso Workshop at no extra cost, and is not available on the Free plan.
