What is lost when the service department runs on an Excel file?

Every morning an advisor walks a customer to the drive and decides what to recommend on that car. That happens at 8:15. The GM asks how the month looks at the 9:00 huddle. The spreadsheet that could answer either of them lands at 10:30, if the person who builds it came in that day.

Most stores run on that spreadsheet anyway. A manager exports from the DMS, tidies it up in Excel and emails it to a list. This reporting structure has two flaws that no formatting fixes. It only runs when the manager dedicates time to building it, and it only ever shows what fits in one email. The second flaw is the reason that each role needs its own view.

The decisions come first, the file comes second

Picture a store with four advisors, each writing about six customer pay ROs a day. Two or three of those are written before the morning report goes out. That is roughly ten of the store's 24 ROs, four in every ten, written without a look at yesterday. The advisor who skipped key services on half of Tuesday's cars has no way of knowing it on Wednesday morning, and by the time the file arrives the morning rush is over and the pattern has already repeated.

The GM sits in the same position one level up. Asked about the month on the 14th, they answer from whatever file they last opened, which may be the 10th's. The table shows who needs a number in a typical store, when they need it, and when the emailed version tends to show up.

Who needs a number	What they need	When they need it	When the emailed file arrives (example)
Advisor	Own ROs per day, labour gross per RO, Key %	Before the first customer, 7:30	10:30, after the morning rush
Service manager	Store vs target, which advisor is behind	Start of day, and again mid-afternoon	10:30, once a day
Parts manager	Parts gross vs target	Start of day	Separate file, often weekly
GM	Projected month vs target	Whenever asked	Whatever file was last opened
Group director	Every store vs target	Monday morning	A different file from each store

The report runs at the pace of whoever builds it

A report that lives in one person's head has one point of failure. When that person takes a week off, the department either runs blind or someone less practised rebuilds the file their own way, with their own filters, taking twice as long. The second outcome is the worse one. Now there are two reports that disagree, and when the manager comes back nobody is sure which to believe.

A daily file is still somebody's morning

Say the file takes 45 minutes. Over a 21 workday month that is close to 16 hours, two full working days, spent reformatting numbers the DMS already holds. Those are two days not spent on the drive, in the shop, or with the advisor who needed help on Tuesday. Nobody budgets for the cost because it never appears on a line item. It is paid every month regardless.

One file is one angle

A spreadsheet that fits in an email shows one slice of the store: one period, usually one department, one number per column. The advisor's view, the manager's view and the group's view are three different slices of the same repair orders, and no single file holds all three without becoming unreadable. What each of those people should be looking at is the subject of who sees which numbers. Whether the month is still on track by the 15th, which the file also cannot tell you without manual intervention, is covered in projecting month-end gross.

How KPI Sight does it

KPI Sight reads repair order data straight from the DMS and shows current results to advisors, managers and group leaders without anyone building or sending a report. Each role sees the numbers for its job, and the view is there whether or not the manager is in that day.