Motive Power 3 Evaluation for GarageKeeper 2000 Users

This document is to help GarageKeeper 2000 users decide when and whether they should change to Motive Power 3.  We created Motive Power from the responses we got to the 8 page survey we sent out to GarageKeeper 2000 users in 2002. We had the first version, Motive Power 1, in 2004. That was a single user program. It laid out the basics for increased profitability by changing to a shop workflow approach. In 2007 we released Motive power 2. It provided support for a single service writer and a number of techs. In October 2009 we finished the main beta test of Motive Power 3. This version allows multiple people to be working on the same work order at the same time. Since most GarageKeeper 2000 users have multiple service writers we did not contact all of you about the earlier versions. When you change to Motive Power 3 we provide the ability to convert your customers, vehicles, parts, and paid invoices from GarageKeeper to Motive Power.

Design Criteria for Motive Power

We had a unique challenge designing Motive Power for several reasons.

• A lot of you have been with us 20 years or more and are starting to spend less time at the shop.
• Your younger workers are not thrilled to use the GarageKeeper interface.
• We wanted to continue to selling our products for a fixed price, no monthly or annual fees.
•  We wanted to be sure that you only do things once with SmartJobs, re-use of information from any job, part, or sublet, and the ability to split unsold jobs onto a new estimate.
• We needed to change the emphasis to greater labor profitability because parts margins have dropped.
• We needed to increase the usage rate of service jobs and service reminders.
• We needed to be sure that the data integrity was at least as good as that provided by the Btrieve data engine used in GarageKeeper 2000.
• We had to fix some long standing problems in the GarageKeeper approach.
• We wanted to go where Microsoft is headed, which means using SQL Server and being able to run the latest 64 bit Windows 7.
• We wanted to give you access to your data from Excel, Word and other report writers.
• We wanted techs to understand what needed to be done in what order and to be able to communicate with the service writer without leaving the bays or passing notes.

Survey Requests from GarageKeeper 2000 Users

We took the top requests from GarageKeeper 2000 user survey and user group meetings and added our interpretation of the best way to satisfy your requests:

• Choice of mouse driven or keyboard driven navigation for most items
• Focusing on the flow of each job through the shop instead of on the vehicle
• Smart Jobs that automate what used to be done to create service jobs
• Time clock and scheduling built in to help promote workflow
• Different view of work in progress for use by techs at the point of service
• All information shown on the screen or on dropdowns, no codes to remember
• Real-time integration with QuickBooks, Excel and Word instead of exports and imports
• Single click to e-mail or print customer reminders
• Customer search includes color, body style, engine, phones, and service history
• Easy to include company graphic and color on invoices
• Context sensitive help, push F1 and you get help for the screen you are on
• More emphasis on analysis and decision support
• Conversion software to bring across vehicles, customers, parts, and megadisk invoices from GarageKeeper 2000

Spending less time at the shop means you need better reporting and analysis tools. GarageKeeper showed you the parts margin. Motive Power both displays and controls labor, parts and sublet margins for each job on the work order and for the work order overall. You can make settings to insure that work orders that don’t meet your profit minimums can’t be invoiced without your approval. The Excel decision cubes (also known as pivot tables) make it very easy to tell what techs/makes/models/years/operations are more profitable. For example, you can evaluate how different techs do with different service writers, or find out what specific makes or years of vehicles need to be charged more in order to meet your profit requirements. Unlike GarageKeeper, you can pull any report for any period at any time.

Most people under 45 or so are turned off by character mode screens. It does not matter whether or not that is reasonable. It does matter that it is true. Windows has evolved into a system designed to be interrupted by messages, e-mails, timers, and other things that are running at the same time on the computer. These interruptions are in addition to the ones from phone calls, tech questions, and parts handling. With GarageKeeper you needed to finish a screen before proceeding. In Motive Power you can jump out of any screen at any time and go to any Motive Power screen or other application. Occasionally this results in missing an entry in a field. When you total a work order or go to finalize one, Motive Power checks to be sure that all the required fields have been entered. Items that need attention come up on your chosen alert color. Hovering over the alert will tell you exactly why you are being alerted. The process of making work orders in Motive Power 3 is a good fit for people used to doing several tasks at once.

We have always viewed our software as products that you could buy. We may be the only company in this market that is not based on recurring revenues. We don’t charge customers to run programs that need lots of updates and fixes to be stable. We choose our programming tools and technology for the best combination of data integrity, reliability, and performance. We made earlier graphical shop management modules based on other database engines (Access and Paradox). They did not survive my own destructive testing and we never sold any shop management software based on those technologies. Motive Power 3 runs on SQL Server 2005. Data integrity is better than GarageKeeper 2000. Most of you have had to do the occasional file rebuilder to fix a bad index. In the 8 years we have been working on Motive Power we have yet to rebuild a damaged file. We do careful work backed up by the quality of the SQL Server database.

Differences between GarageKeeper 2000 and Motive Power 3

There is a reason that you may be reading about Motive Power for the first time and wondering about Motive Power 1 and Motive Power 2. The average GarageKeeper 2000 shop has more than 1 service writer. Motive Power 3 is the first version of Motive Power that provides for multiple service writers. Motive Power 1 was a single user product. Motive Power 2 had software for a single service writer and multiple techs. Motive Power 3 can be used by multiple service writers and multiple techs. You can read about the development of Motive Power by going to http://www.computerassistance.com/motivepower/mpversions.htm

GarageKeeper is vehicle-centric. By that I mean the vehicle is the core component. Customers are associated with vehicles. Parts sales are associated with vehicles. Service history is associated with vehicles. When invoices are finalized, data is aggregated and running totals are kept. GarageKeeper set up is very flexible, and it takes a long time to set up and to understand.

GarageKeeper is the kind of software that the computer industry calls a silo application. This means that it stands alone. It is extremely reliable. We have programming control over how each item on each screen looks and acts. A lot of the code is in assembler. As a result GarageKeeper 2000 is very fast on basic equipment. GarageKeeper 2000 has the best PC-based inventory control in the industry.

The GarageKeeper 2000 negatives are the same as with any silo program. It is very hard to make changes and it does not play well with other programs.

Motive Power goes as far the other way as it can and still run on generic PCs. Motive Power is good with e-mail clients. Motive Power is good with FTP clients. Motive Power has real time connections to QuickBooks Pro 2004 or better and Simple Start. Motive Power interacts directly with Excel 2000 or better to provide pivot table based multi-dimensioned views of sales figures. Motive Power data can be used directly by Word 2002 for mailings other than the built-in e-mail and postcard reminders. Motive Power sends data to CustomerLink for those of you who prefer to use a third party customer reminder service. Motive Power installs with a full set of makes and models and job titles so you can start building work orders right away. In short, Motive Power can do a lot.

Motive Power 3 is job-centric. All work is organized around the job. For example, the job Brakes-FrontDiscs was done by a given tech to a given vehicle, which at the time had a license of xxxxxx and was owned by John Doe.

Motive Power automatically tracks the vehicle through multiple license plates and owners. The vehicle’s service history and any reminders due or sent remain accurate over time.

Motive Power has features we have wanted to add to GarageKeeper:

• All jobs are automatically service jobs, no structure or setup required
• There is no required start of day, end of day, end of week processing
• Parts can be added to tickets and orders tracked without formal purchase orders or receivings
• Profit scoring for each section of each job: parts, labor and sublet
• Fine grained security settings for the tech module
• Special features in the tech module to direct workers to help increase production
• Ability to attach files to the history of a work order
• Easy access to a voice message on each work order
• Interfaces to popular software already listed

Upgrading to Motive Power 3 is only attractive if you make more money because of it. Shops that have changed from GarageKeeper to Motive Power and given access to techs have experienced a good return. They have increased labor billings by 15 to 20 minutes each day for each tech. If you have 3 techs and charge $90 an hour that is $1800 a month not counting the additional parts sold. That is the short term return. Shop floor control, better decision support and one click reminders provide the long term benefit. In most cases you will get 100% return on investment in under 6 months, even including the extra time you will spend to get up to speed on Motive Power. If not for this initial period, payback would be complete in 3 to 4 months.

Web sites that sell parts at low cost plus prices have made it difficult to get the same parts margins you used to get. These web sites buy from the same WDs and expediters that you do. As a result labor rates have gone up significantly. Competition for rapid or hot shot parts deliveries to your shops has heated up. We can help you generate more profit by billing two more minutes an hour. Motive Power shows techs which jobs needs to be done in which order. Service writers can tell what jobs are being worked on at any given time. They get alerts if a job might not be ready by the promised time. They can balance workloads by adding, removing, or switching techs on particular jobs.

When we analyzed the survey results we found two major profit generating features that were not being used enough. We found that many of you did not send service reminders regularly and many of you did not make much use of service jobs (the labor lines that you start with the J code). We changed the reminder system to be almost automatic. It now takes one click to send out all the emailed service reminders. It takes one click to print out the reminder postcards that are due. We came up with the concept of SmartJobs as an improvement over service jobs. With SmartJobs any job on any invoice can be pulled onto the current estimate or work order. SmartJobs get updated by making a change on the current work order. They do not get setup or maintained separately. SmartJobs also include comments. If you enter notes for the techs about the particulars of how to do a job on a particular make/model/year those notes will reappear next time you ask for that job and vehicle combination.

There were things designed into GarageKeeper because of price/performance considerations for the hardware available at the time GarageKeeper 2000 was released. We needed to be careful about how much hard drive space got used and to maintain good performance. That meant designing for low CPU usage to maintain speed on a basic peer to peer network using standard PCs. To accomplish this GarageKeeper aggregated data when you paid an invoice or ran end of day/week/month/year. In the last couple of years, fast Core Duo and Quad Core processors, inexpensive memory and large hard drives have reduced that need. Motive Power keeps all the data that made up the initial work order as live searchable data. This enables the SmartJobs approach and provides the ability to get any kind of report for any period. It also means that there is no start of day, end of day, end of week or end of year processing. You can balance your cashbox at any time, most likely when you are actually making up your deposit.

There were two things we considered long term problems that have been redesigned in Motive Power. GarageKeeper has a way to track license plate and owner changes but it does not work well if you don’t do it just right. Motive Power creates a vehicle ID for each vehicle. This keeps the repair history and reminders consistent regardless of what plate number is on the vehicle or who owns it. Those of you doing fleet service had a problem because you didn’t have a work order ID early in the process and had to do something extra to keep fleet managers happy. Motive Power creates a work order ID as soon as you start a new ticket. If you start it as an estimate you get a separate estimate number. The invoice number is generated like GarageKeeper when the invoice is finalized. Motive Power can look up tickets by work order ID or invoice number.

SmartJobs in Motive Power 3 versus Service Jobs in GarageKeeper 2000

SmartJobs are one of the best features of Motive Power. Every job that you finalize becomes available for re-use. Information from several areas is used to create detailed service jobs. The data engine used in Motive Power has so much capability that the program can keep details of every job done. This means that you only have to enter most information once in the lifetime of Motive Power.

You start by picking a job title for the work to be done. The first time you do a job you will enter the job description, labor time, parts and sublet if any. When that work order is finalized you have built a custom job for that job title for that make, model and year. The next time you do that same job, you pick the job title and you are done. The details of that job title are available as a starting point when you use that job title on any other make, model and year of vehicle. In a very short time you will have many detailed jobs. This will save you lots of time writing estimates and work orders. It will enable less knowledgeable workers to make work orders the way you want them to be done.

Motive Power learns the way you want things done. When starting a new job the program uses the most recent qualified job as the starting point. This means that the smart jobs are continually refined as you gain more experience. You don't have to have a comprehensive understanding to get started. Because Motive Power uses the latest data, you don't have to live with your initial attempts forever.

SmartJobs integrate information from the following areas of Motive Power:

• Work orders: job description, parts list, sublet list, service intervals
• Vehicles: make, model, year
• Customer: parts pricing
• Settings: job title, generic job description, labor operation, generic service interval
• Personnel: hourly rate for operation

SmartJobs help with analysis in the reports section of Motive Power

• Time clock: by job title, by operation
• Job Analysis: by operation

Who should change to Motive Power 3 now

If your shop is in or near a city and you can get most parts within an hour or so you are a good prospect to move to Motive Power now. A major difference between GarageKeeper 2000 and Motive Power 3 is the way inventory is handled. The question then becomes one of deciding if you will make more money with the current version of Motive Power or whether you need detailed inventory control. Please see the item entitled “Deciding the Parts Question” to help you make that decision. Motive Power gives you the ability to enter parts directly onto the face of the work order without putting it into the parts list first and the ability to override the selling price of any part in addition to the pricing by customer type that you are used to using. The recommended way to handle parts in Motive Power is to order every part for every job (not including fasteners and bulk liquids). You will continue to stock one or two deep on your fast movers. By ordering this way you get your fast movers restocked at the same time as you get the items that are particular for this work order. You will be keeping fast movers on hand so the techs can make progress until the other parts get delivered. Motive Power helps you pick a part type for each part on the work order. You can separate out things that you only order periodically or when you hit your required minimum.

Who should wait to change to Motive Power 3

There is one reason that you should wait to change to Motive Power and that is inventory control. You have a large performing inventory. You intend to keep a large inventory. You are the primary source of supply in your area for the parts you stock. Please read “Deciding the Parts Question” to help you see where you stand.

We have started testing the interface to an inventory control module from Microsoft called the Retail Management System or RMS. Anybody that truly needs inventory control would like more features than the GarageKeeper 2000 inventory provides. RMS has features like sizes and colors since those of you that really need a big inventory are often selling enthusiast items like trim, accessories, hats, and clothes. You can also put items on sale without affecting your regular cost and price for those items. RMS gets information from Motive Power for the parts sold each day, relieves the inventory and builds purchase orders.

Deciding the Parts Question

When you strip out everything else the main question is: Are you spending more to protect your inventory than that inventory is worth?

The one area where the current version of Motive Power 3 does less than GarageKeeper is in the area of inventory control. The current version of Motive Power 3 is for shops that get most of their parts from local delivery. We found that most shops getting over 70% of parts by rapid delivery instead of from in house inventory no longer keep the GarageKeeper inventory accurate. Here are three questions that will help you decide if you should move to Motive Power 3 now.

1.    1. If you had to swear that the inventory value on your GarageKeeper weekly report was correct would you feel comfortable doing that? If the answer is no then you should look at Motive Power 3. If your answer is yes, go on to the next question (you probably should look at the next question either way, to see where you stand).

2.    2. After the following analysis does the dollar value found in the analysis exceed 20% of the total annual cost of the worker who has the primary responsibility for ordering parts, plus the carrying cost of the excess inventory, plus the annual cost of the square footage occupied by the parts? In other words, are you paying more to protect the inventory than the inventory is worth? Perform these steps using GarageKeeper :