Community-driven garage management system Garage Hive has launched a new data website called Garage Industry Trends.
The announcement was made by Managing Director Ray Dilsons during his keynote address to a group of 230 customer and industry delegates attending The Blend 2022 conference at Birmingham’s Eastside Rooms on 17th September.
Garage Industry Trends is a new standalone service which uses aggregated data from opted-in Garage Hive customers to create key performance metrics in real time. The beta version of the service went live during The Blend. Over 40 garage customers signed up on the day of the conference to share the anonymised data needed to power the platform, with another 60 garages opting in over the course of the following weeks.
The service will initially measure four key performance indicator averages; these are invoice value, labour rate, number of future bookings, and ‘net promoter score’. Each is displayed on the Garage Industry Trends website as a daily value, calculated on a monthly rolling average basis.
“Even in this early phase the data is powerful and useful,” said Ray. “Garage owners can compare their own figures with trustworthy industry averages to see how they compare at any time.”
Measuring something as simple and fundamental as independent garage labour rates reliably have always proved elusive until now. The typical method has been to rely on survey responses. These are cumbersome to gather, reliant upon information stated verbally and almost immediately become outdated.
“We’re averaging from actual garage labour rates on a daily basis, and that’s never been done before,” said Ray. “When we show a value, you can be sure it’s real, and it’s current!”
Over time, its expected trends of changes will prove insightful too, particularly given the current turbulence around rising operating costs and cyclical post-Covid MOT booking volumes, which make the performance even more difficult to benchmark for garage owners.
Garage Hive says the initial focus will be on helping customers understand the powerful future benefits of shared data to grow opt-in levels before rolling out more sophisticated metrics and reports in due course.
Garage Hive is keen to share its insights for the benefit of the whole independent sector. For more information, please visit www.garageindustrytrends.com.
03 October 2022
The Penygroes Service Centre located in South Wales was founded in 2014 by Jonathan. He has extensive 17 years of experience in the industry. However, Jon found himself doing a lot of manual labour for data management to keep a finger on the pulse of the business. Therefore, joined Garage Hive's garage management software in March 2021 and has already seen a significant improvement in his garage, an increase in gross profit and has achieved a great NPS® Score.
Tom and Kayleigh runs their garage TR Autos in Yeovil, Somerset. They joined Garage Hive last year. Tom has two decades of industry experience , both practical and technician side and now business as TR Autos was founded in 2008; since then the team has grown, practices have moved away from paper diaries to garage management software, their productivity has increased and they also have moved into bigger premises.
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