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thanks for the input guys. After sending the email to all the people at enterprise support, we had a large conference call addressing my concerns. Basically, it looks like i am going to have to deal with the shortcomings in service writing, but i should recoup that time in administrative functions. We will see how it pans out. Thanks.

My link

I have been back and forth over the past few weeks about my shop management software. Currently we are using Shopkey5 aka Mitchell1 manager. After speaking to my rep and some back and forth, I decided to give the new Mitchell1 Enterprise aka Protractor a shot. I began integrating and training on the protractor software back in March, and I do like a lot of it. However we were supposed to go live today and begin using only this software. We have invested a lot of time and money into the software at this point, and I am beginning to have some serious doubts. The Protractor software is very robust, but also tedious. There are a few things that it falls short on, so far the service writing portion of it seems very lacking to say the least. We are about half way through the training and it does not seem like it will be a good fit at this point. However, I still have not given this a fair shot, and plan on working with it some more before making a final decision. I sent an email to some of the people I have been working with tonight expressing my concerns and hope they will find a way to address them. I feel that there have been too many instances at this point that I am having to settle. Honestly, for the price tag, I would have thought this software to be gods gift to shop management. I am now thinking I moved to quickly to a new management system, and should have given Shop key 5 a better shot by upgrading to the quick books integrator and inventory system. I can work through the shop key service writing at an incredible pace, and do it in a really nice way for the customer with the use of sub estimates. I think it is very nice to have pick and choose packages, and the customers seem to like this, we also have a very high rate of success with our up-selling because we take the time to estimate multiple scenarios and show customers savings with over lapping work. Another fail of the protractor is the limited catalog integration. We use Worldpac a lot (average 8K per month). While it does integrate with Worldpac, it is very limited and "glitchy". For instance, in a ticket that has 10 part lines, most of the lines will not be found when interrogating Worldpac, and then if we launch the speed-dial application from the software, the parts must be brought back in one at a time. We have not gone into the training for administration, but at this point I am very concerned about investing any more time into this. Bottom line is this program feels very outdated and not quite capable of dealing with complex estimating. Every process that needs to be done requires at least a few additional steps vs how we deal with it now. Any insight on management programs would be a great help, specifically these two. Please bear in mind we only work on European cars and a lot of the work is performance oriented. We do heavy repair including manufacturing of our own parts. Thanks.

there is no single scan tool that can handle everything. We use several tools to cover the european makes and have tried many. Google Ross tech for your vw audi. This thing is a steal, it does every function the VW Audi VAS 5052 will do and is supported with a great wiki that really cuts down code chasing. For BMW, the knock off TIS tool does great and is a go to tool here, the knock off pricing is low enough to not stress the investment. but most higher end scanners will cover you here as well. If you want to do mercedes, nothing ive used can really help completely, Mercedes cornered the market with there Star Tek info service and GFF, again the knock off will do well here. Porsche can sometimes work well with the Ross tech unit, but another company called durametric makes a nice solution as well. I also hear good things about car soft, so you may want to look into that. Our solutions are as follow VW/Audi Ross Tech VCDS BMW BMW GT1 Mercedes Star 2010 Porsche Durametric ( we will upgrade once the demand is higher) Everything else Snap On verus with all add ons I looked into the autologic, and the pricing cant be justified, although it is nice. They wanted 10k for support on one make and 8k for each additional make, you get one year of programming updates and then have to pay a lot more for another year for support. I bought a Dyno instead Honestly the verus was overkill for a tool, the value for me was 16 channels of data acquisition and the lab scope. It is terribly overpriced though, as it is a custom made panasonic toughbook with a processor that hasnt been used for home consumer markets in about 10 years. I was very disappointed with this and as soon as the warranty is over I will be opening it for a full hardware upgrade.

I had a run in with this some time ago and took the direct approach. I hold meetings every so often over a company supplied lunch and express my concerns about issues such as cell phone use. The fact of the matter is, a shop is a dangerous environment, and a distracted person in a shop is a hazard to himself and others. Im sure we all have seen the mechanic with one hand on a car and the other on his ear. I also further explain the loss of productivity and the effects of it on our small team. With a smaller team of guys like us, if one guy is not giving 100% he is the weakest link and hurting the rest of us. Ive worked hard to keep a collective team environment, and in this atmosphere, nobody including myself wants to be the one the lets the others down. While rare cell phone use still occurs, I make it a point to let the person know I see it, and to wrap it up, as there is never spare time here, and if someone believes there is spare time, I find a great use of it LOL.

Hey guys, I am a relatively young shop owner (31 next week). I currently have a single location shop in Baltimore MD. I started the company in 2006 out of my 20x20 home garage, and now have a 10000 square foot facility. We specialize only in European automotive performance, maintenance, and repair. We basically have 3 divisions here in our shop. We have a web store, a service repair shop, and our performance division. We have grown incredibly fast, and that is why i am here. i hired general managers to operate the administration of the company and always stuck to what i did best, working on cars. While those guys were really good and loyal, they inadvertently handicapped our company because they were without my support, and made some poor decisions, and were forced to be reactive instead of proactive. I re-took control of the administration of the company and I have very big goals for growth. I am here to learn from you much more experienced guys on how to further do this. We kind of differ from most general shops, but the core operating remains the same. We manufacture our own parts, and stock many other performance parts. We also have international relationships with companies that distribute our products. We also burn a lot of money in R&D as well as engineering and performance equipment. I was not fortunate to have any financial backing starting this and pretty much built it as I could. This shop is my life's work, just like most of you, and I am truly terrified of making mistakes that can cost me and my personnel dearly. i look forward to knowing you guys and receiving guidance from you. My goals are to have a very state of the art facility for my development, and multiple franchise locations for my service shop. But I need to get the groundwork built first. Its pretty sad that we are at this level and I am just learning to properly run a business. Thanks for reading and I will be up for a while browsing!