AED Magazine Feature
July 2025 Edition
The Work Order Wake-Up Call
Why Dealerships Can’t Afford to Ignore Their Own Data
Brock Moir, COO, T1 Technology Corp.
1. Stop Sleeping on a Gold Mine
Dealer principals obsess – rightly – about revenue, margins and potential acquisitions.
There is one lever that can move the needle on all three of these, yet it remains underutilized: the thousands of work orders your technicians close every year. Every ticket captures a slice of tribal knowledge that their OEMs don’t have.
2. Why OEM Information Isn’t Enough
Manufacturers are great at building iron, limiting their exposure to warranties, and publishing standard servicing and operating information. But they only curate documentation around standard repairs and warranty defects.
Valuable, yes, but: Your service department sees the real-world use, edge cases, aftermarket modifications, local operating conditions and the creative fixes OEM engineers never imagined. These insights are a competitive moat – if you can reach it when it matters.
3. The Hidden Costs of Neglecting Work Order Information
-
Repeat diagnostics — Techs and service managers spend unbillable hours retracing problems already solved last season, or elsewhere across your complex.
-
Inconsistent quotes — Without historical parts and labor data, estimating becomes tribal knowledge, leaving some of your service managers guessing and ultimately eroding margin.
-
Missed parts and service upsell opportunities — Not knowing what parts are associated with a job, or the level of complexity of the job, means your parts team isn’t upselling as much as they should be.
-
Long onboarding cycles — New hires learn only by shadowing veterans rather than leveraging a shared knowledge base.
-
Lower valuation and operational efficiency — Your complex won’t benefit from documented, repeatable processes and proprietary data assets, and it will take longer to bring newly acquired stores up to your standard.
-
Leaving money on the table with warranties — Every warranty claim you make has to be manually processed, increasing the risk of errors and missed revenue reviewed and adjusted to ensure completeness, and related jobs that could also be claimed on the warranty are often missed.
4. Turning Work Orders Into Power Plays
-
Train faster — Make “great fix” notes mandatory, then dump them into a searchable knowledge base. Rookies learn from yesterday’s jobs instead of shadowing for months — a proven retention booster.
-
Tell better customer stories — Detailed complaint–cause–correction notes let advisors hand customers a clear narrative instead of a cryptic line item. Transparency builds trust and repeat business.
-
Capture every warranty dollar — Use past claims to find related jobs and ensure that your notes capture all the work done; this will raise reimbursements and reduce your audit risk.
-
Quote with confidence — Find work orders related to average hours, typical parts, real cost. Quotes stop being guesses, and margin stays where you planned it.
5. Bottom Line
Work orders aren’t just paperwork — they’re proprietary IP. Dealers who surface that data will:
-
Out-diagnose competitors with faster first-time fixes.
-
Protect margins with data-backed estimating.
-
Increase aftermarket revenues through upselling parts and service.
-
Onboard techs in weeks — not seasons.
-
Recover warranty cash that others leave on the table.
Wake up, dig in, and let the knowledge your technicians create every day work as hard as they do.