Product Overview

The most common method of booking cars into the shop is by the use of a diary at the front desk that spans your production week. Traditionally, the approach to managing this critical workflow process has been to bring all the vehicles in on Monday/Tuesday and then try to have them all out by the Friday. A change in approach to this important process is now being adopted by many progressive panel shops by staggering the incoming work flow. By bringing some vehicles in on each day of the week, and then aiming to have a similar number of vehicles leaving each day, they can successfully even out the peaks and troughs of continual production. This is not a new concept in any way and is used in many businesses around the world under the more familiar name of Just In Time production.

Without the proper monitoring tools, both methods can cause major problems with workflow. The Monday/Tuesday approach causes bottlenecks because by Thursday the paint shop is often clogged up, but the panel beaters are standing around waiting to fit up cars that aren't quite ready for their attention. Staggering the bookings certainly helps to overcome this problem. But without the right tool, variations in the Panel/Paint labour content of each job can greatly influence the anticipated outcome of any such planning. Properly allowing for these variations on a job by job basis further minimises the occurrence of idle times and/or bottlenecks.

D5Plan-IT is the solution. It works simply by matching the Panel/Paint content of each job with the shops capacity in target hours, to complete that job on time. It maximises the use of all labour and capital by planning a smooth flow of work for each job, in the optimum time of the production week. This avoids bottlenecks, stoppages and excessive idle time and eliminates the peaks and troughs of full labour utilization. Productivity gains of between 10 and 25% are possible if tools such as D5Plan-IT are properly implemented and used by today's modern repairer.

System Features Include...

• Setup the shops labour capacity in Target Hours around the broad sub-activities of Strip, Repair, Paint Prep, Paint, Refit and Detail.
• The sub-activities can consolidate to the major categories of Panel and Paint Shop.Setup budgets in dollars for each of the labour sectors.
• Reduce target hour capacity and dollar budgets in holiday periods if required.
• Prioritise jobs and sort them if required. Eg mark all XYZ Insurer jobs as priority 1 and sort them accordingly.
• Prioritise jobs in order by ORM or ARNIE or Estimage or PNet if required.
• Enter Reason for booking which may include Estimate, Assessment, Repairs, Rework, etc
• Apply any form of Car ID to a vehicle booking for easy location in the workshop
• Book jobs today, tomorrow, this week, next week or next month based on the shops output capacity in target hours.
• As jobs are booked in, the daily target hours are accumulated and represented as a percentage of capacity in the main Panel/Paint Shop bar graphs.
• The simple to read graphical representation makes it very easy to identify where bottlenecks might occur and then avoid them
• Underutilised workshop capacity stands out very clearly for your immediate attention
• You can Trial Fit jobs based on available capacity to ensure smooth workflow and maximum output from available labour resources.
• The Trial Fit functionality can also be used to book vehicles based on guaranteed delivery dates.
• Jobs are flagged by status indicators which include:
  • (phone) The job has NOT been confirmed with the customer - click on the owner details button for relevant phone numbers to confirm the vehicle arrival date.
  • (tick) The customer has Confirmed the arrival date.
  • (car) The vehicle has arrived in the workshop for repairs.
  • (clock) The Job has been Scheduled in the D5Work-IT system.