The Problem
Before Service Price Guides, producing estimates for our customers was a long and tedious process. The technician would quote the work, walk it over to the parts department to price the parts, go into ALLDATA® or Identifix and pull the actual hours up, take everything to a service advisor, and then the advisor would put his pencil to paper and come up with a total estimate for the customer.
There were so many problems with that process. There were times when the technicians had multiple jobs they were trying to quote at one time and they’d stand at the parts counter waiting for pricing anywhere from 10-20 minutes. If an advisor was on the phone when a tech walked up, it could be another 10 minutes just to get the advisor the estimate and another 40 minutes before the final estimate was produced and a call was made to the customer.
Sometimes it took nearly an hour to put together one price estimate for a customer.
We created a spreadsheet for our advisors to keep track of quotes for our customers, but there was always the chance they’d put the decimal in the wrong place and misquote a customer by hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. It wasn’t uncommon to have one parts guy price a job one way and a different parts guy price it another way. We had advisors who used our grid labor rate and others who used a discounted labor rate or door rate, so quotes were all over the place.
