What are the project’s aims and artefact?
The aim of the ‘automated workshop management system’ is to
reduce the amount of paper based systems a current automotive Workshop has to process
on a day to day basis. Every service garage has some IT based Planning system,
but very few have an operations system for working at a detailed level – for
example: assigning jobs to technicians and timing how long the technicians
spend on each job. This proposal
concerns a system to handle operations.
The system aim is to reduce confusion between service staff and workshop
technicians who carry out the work on customer vehicles. It will ensure that all work is documented in
the appropriate format and reduce the number of mistakes/human error and also
mischarged services to a vehicle.
To avoid the current paper based systems of job sheets and
car check sheets, I will design an electronic web based system using the server
side scripting language PHP. The system will allow all current paper based job
sheets to become electronic reducing the amount of paper being passed around
from technician to service staff. This in turn lowers the communication between
staff and improving labour times a higher accuracy level.
Objectives:
• Critically analyse competitor
systems and find ways of improvement
• Evaluate and review system created
by implementing into business environment
Artefact:
Each workshop employee will have an ID card which has a
printed Barcode much like a membership card. This will then be scanned by the
system using a barcode scanner to authenticate the user. Once the user is
logged in they can see what jobs need to be completed for that set day and the
amount of labour hours it should take to complete. The system will log their
time on the job and also their overall time of working so that wages can be
managed by the system.
The system will also give ‘Service staff’ an overview of the
current jobs that are being commenced or near to completion as they can monitor
and track all jobs that are active – optimizing customer service and possibly
more time for customer relation/bookings. This avoids the ‘middle man’
communications between staff and technicians can get on with completing work
that needs to be carried out on a vehicle.
My research will come from local businesses that have paper
based systems in place to see how effective the current system performs. I will
find out if an electronic system would improve production with the benefits of having
an organised system in place.
