The Business Control Panel is NOT a traditional Dashboard

Dashboards and reports show results from time periods in the past. Well-designed dashboards compare the past performance with a goal.
The following most important questions are not answered by dashboards and become subject to, often hourlong, detective work:

1. What is the root cause of the performance of the business or tool?

2. How exactly should staff behavior or tool configurations change to create better results?

This is where the Business Control Panel (BCP) unleashes its power.
Check below the comparison between well-designed Dashboard on the left showing typical KPIs with the Business Control Panel – Insights screen plotting how the inspection sent rate for the main service advisors influences the ARO.

How to use the Business Control Panel

What are the KPIs based on?

All KPIs are calculated from completed appointments. A completed appointment has the following attributes

1. An appointment date (or work order date) is present
2. A work order with labor on it is present
3. A customer and vehicle is present
4. The work order is closed out

All other appointments with counter sales are NOT included in the KPIs. So if your PoS shows a different ARO than the BCP, you might have counter sales included and the BCP does not.

AutoVitals’ mission is to help its clients to increase labor sales. Labor sales keep a shop humming and be profitable. We help our clients with best practices to increase these labor sales especially through the use of educating motorists about the health status of their vehicle using one or more Vehicle Health Inspections.

Often our clients have internal needs for inspections, which don’t cover vehicle health, but are rather performed for quality assurance or CYA reasons. These so-called internal inspections are excluded from the Inspection KPIs, like Inspection rate, Inspection sent rate, Picture edit rate etc. The underlying completed appointment is NOT excluded from any KPI, since the basic assumption is that ANY work order with labor on it provides the opportunity to upsell a health inspection despite what you might think or what your expereince has been in the paper based world. Lets explore the two biggest challenges encountered often:

1. Fleet Customers:
   Fleet managers often seem to manage a fleet based on “Run the vehicles until they break and buy new ones after. No expenses for maintenance.” No opportunity for a health inspection? No email address on file, or cell phone number of the fleet manager? Why not approach fleet owner/managers with the same value proposition as anybody else? Maintenance helps prolonging the life of a vehicle substantially. Other than in the paper based world, the digital vehicle health inspection offers opportunities to point out repeat patterns (“after analyzing the work we have done to many of your vehicles we discovered a trend in tire wear/brakes/batteries etc. if those are taken care off earlier, you could have saved $$$$$. Here is the documentation.”)
2. Sublet:
   Sometimes shops assume that sublet work for other shops doesn’t allow to do vehicle health inspections for the owner/driver of the vehicle. Why not?
   Consider approaching the shop giving you sublet work and agree to get the driver’s email address/cell phone number/name and send a health inspection to them with your logo and the other shop’s logo in the header of the inspection results. Both of your shops will benefit from the increased transparency. Why not try it?