style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; LINE-HEIGHT: 150%"> Maryland Heights, Mo. -- Rob Fox said he remembers exactly when he decided the family business in this St. Louis suburb, Bob's Transmission and Automotive Service, was in critical need of management software.
The business had grown to the point in 1993, he said, that his mother, Judy, was feeling the strain of trying to keep up with processing the payroll and a mounting stack of repair orders. Fox said he was not working in the business owned by his father, Bob, at the time, but she had called him in tears looking for his help.
"I said, 'Let's get things a little more automated; let's get some software,'" said Fox, who now owns the business. "Not knowing the automotive business, I didn't know what products were out there."
Fox, an electronics engineer at the time, said he started researching shop management software companies, in part by reading industry publications.
He said he selected R.O. Writer for its ability to interface with accounting software and Alldata service information software.
The business will rack up about $2.7 million this year in sales, Fox said, with the business being split roughly in half between the transmission side and the automotive service side.
Since December 2005, he said, the company has been using the scheduling option in R.O. Writer, which he said has been a big time-saver given the volume done at the business. Last year, he said, the automotive service side wrote more than 7,000 repair orders, and the transmission side wrote more than 1,800 repair orders.
What once took two people two hours in the evening can now be done efficiently throughout the day, Fox said. One feature that is particularly useful is the rollover feature, he said, which allows him to easily carry to the next day's schedule any vehicles not finished the first day.
The data that R.O. Writer provides allows Fox and his two service managers, Bob Hatfield in the transmission shop and Greg Rice in the service shop, to track the technicians' efficiency, Fox said.
"In this industry a few years ago, everyone was concerned with percentages," he said. "As far as being able to calculate our (profit) margin, we weren't able to do that before we got the software."
Fox said many seminar instructors were pushing shops to know their numbers so that management can see what needs improvement.
"Our average efficiency is in the 90-percentile range," he said, "but we also have guys on a regular basis who turn over 100 percent."
To reduce the possibility of errors stemming from a technician eager to trim as much time as possible on a flat-rate job, all technicians are paid a salary and a bonus to increase their efficiency, Fox said. The efficiency reports are posted in the shop for all of the employees to see and to motivate them to catch up with their peers, he said.
Before, the shop knew when it was profitable but not in what area it was losing money or what technician was underproducing, Fox said.
"With the management software, we can focus on losses," he said. "If you're not watching your money other than looking at the checkbook, you won't find them. Now, I've got all of the tools at my disposal to find out why down to each technician. Or, if one of my centers is not producing, an hour and a half later I can know exactly why. I can identify problems using their software. Without it, I would be hell-bent to find them; it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. You can certainly lose a lot of money in a short amount of time if you have a hole leaking money."
In September 1994, Fox said, he came on board full time to help his father run the business. That was shortly after the company expanded by buying an adjacent automotive repair shop that had been a Goodyear franchise, he said. Today, Bob Fox is semi-retired but remains active in the business, his son said.
At the time of the expansion, Bob's had grown to the point that customers began asking for other services while their vehicle was in the shop, Fox said.
With the conflict-of-interest clause in the lease agreement the two businesses had before the purchase, Fox said, Bob's couldn't perform most service work and the Goodyear franchise could not undertake transmission work. So, he said, his father bought out the business and then later purchased the property.
When the automotive service business was first added, it contributed about 40 percent of the company's income, Fox said, increasing over time to about 50-50. One reason, he said, is the increasing durability of transmissions and the fact that many problems causing the transmission to shift strangely are actually drivability problems or other problems outside the transmission.
"The introduction of electronics (transmission control) played a big part of that when I first got here," Fox said. "For any drivability problem, the transmission came out. Anymore, I'd say 40 percent of the time it's an electronic repair done on the car versus pulling the transmission out to fix it. We're fortunate in our transmission business to have the automotive service attached to it."
It takes a skilled technician to know the reason for the symptom, Fox said. And without the shop's Alldata information system, he said, the technicians would not be able to keep up with many of the changes that occur ever more rapidly in vehicle production.
Accordingly, the shop is removing and rebuilding customers' transmissions more and more as the number of seemingly identical units have varying options such as different gear ratios, Fox said, so there are fewer matching, ready-built units on the shelf ready to install.
"We have a few common ones in stock," he said, "especially a lot of the ones that were common five, six, and 10 years ago."
The company also sells wholesale units to area shops, Fox said, adding that he doesn't know what the figure is now, but it's decreased from a high of more than 30 percent of its transmission business.
"We don't go after that business," he said. "The profit margin is not what it could be (versus retail)."
But that service has been popular with other service shops, Fox said, because if there were a warranted problem with the unit, Bob's would tow the vehicle to its shop to fix it.
If the shop expands its wholesale operation outside of its immediate market, Fox said, he will look at buying a transmission dyno. But for now, the shop doesn't have the space, he said, and the relatively small number of comebacks means setting up the dyno may take longer than labor hours lost on a comeback.
Besides the service managers, Fox said the transmission shop has an assistant service manager, four transmission builders, two remove-and-replace technicians, and one "swing" technician who either builds units or removes and replaces units, as needed, and a porter; the service shop has an assistant service manager, five technicians, and a porter. A "swing" porter divides his time between the two businesses.
Fox said that other family members who work part-time on the bookwork are Judy Fox, daughter Jodie Triplett, and granddaughter Stacy Godfrey (Triplett's daughter).
To keep up with all of the changing technology, he said, the shop staff receives training from a number of sources, including ACDelco (the shop is a Total Service Support shop through jobber S&S Automotive). It also is a member of the Automatic Transmission Rebuilders Association and receives training through that organization and the Automatic Transmission Service Group.
Another primary source of training for the shop staff, Fox said, is the Excel Trade Show & Training Conference, which is sponsored by the Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of Missouri (AASP-MO) and is scheduled Oct. 26-28 at Lake Ozark, Mo.
Diagnostics, when they take just a few minutes, are figured in the cost of the repair, said Rice, the automotive service manager. From there, the shop bills the customer at the normal shop rate of $80 per hour in half-hour increments, he said. Most emissions repairs cost between $40 and $120, he said.
Fox said the shop has signed up to be a part of the new Gateway Vehicle Inspection Program that integrates the emissions and safety inspections (see July Parts & People for related article). He said he decided to be part of the program to provide a customer convenience, not as a way to drive business to the shop, which usually has a four-to-five-day backlog of work.
Advance Auto Parts, Feld Chevrolet, CARQUEST jobber Handy Automotive, the Lou Fusz Automotive Network, and O'Reilly Auto Parts are some of the shop's suppliers, Rice said.
Rice said the shop's program from Activant, which integrates with R.O. Writer, allows him to quickly check prices at a number of parts vendors to convert an estimate to a repair order.
"You can schedule the job, hit 'E-order,' and the parts show up in 20 minutes to a half-hour," he said.
