Workshop Management Software That Shows Where the Bay Time Goes
A workshop has four bays and a queue that does not care. KO Fleetz models the bays, the shifts and the technicians who can actually do each job, then puts the whole queue on one board. Waiting for a part stops being counted as work in progress.
The board says four bays. The yard says eleven vehicles.
Capacity in a workshop is fixed. The demand on it is not. Preventive services fall due on the calendar, inspection defects arrive in batches, breakdowns arrive with no notice at all, and every one of them needs the same lifts and the same people. By Tuesday the sequence is being decided by whoever is standing closest to the supervisor.
Most floors run on a whiteboard and one person's memory. That works until the person takes leave. Nobody else can say why the tipper has been in bay two since Thursday, whether anyone ordered the seal, or which of the vehicles outside is nearest to going back to work.
Then the monthly meeting asks why downtime is climbing. The honest answer is usually that a vehicle waited six days for a two-hour job. But nothing in the record separates the two hours from the six days, so the meeting turns into a defence of the workshop rather than a look at the queue.
Make the queue visible before you argue about it
KO Fleetz models the workshop as what it is: a set of bays, a roster of technicians with different sign-offs, and a queue of jobs competing for both. Each job carries an estimated labour time, the skill it needs and the parts it is waiting on. Load for next week is something you look at, not something you find out.
Every vehicle on site has a state, and the states are blunt on purpose. In progress, awaiting parts, awaiting authorisation, awaiting road test, done. That distinction carries the whole page. A truck standing for four days because a hub seal is on backorder is not a productivity failure, and recording it as one has never produced a hub seal.
What the platform will not do is sequence the floor for you. The right order depends on things no system can see: a driver already sitting in the canteen, a contract job that pays this week, the one fitter anybody trusts with that gearbox. KO Fleetz shows the constraint and what each choice costs. The supervisor still chooses.
Capabilities
What KO Fleetz workshop management gives your team
Bay and lift allocation
Books each job into a named bay for a named window, so two vehicles are never quietly promised the same lift on the same morning.
Technician skill matching
Jobs carry the sign-off they require. An injector job does not land on the apprentice who is cleared for brakes and wheel changes.
Honest job states
Awaiting parts, awaiting authorisation and awaiting road test are separate states rather than one blur called in the workshop.
Capacity against commitment
KO Fleetz puts next week's booked labour hours next to the hours you actually have, before the service schedule releases another twenty jobs into them.
In-house and outsourced work
Jobs sent to an external garage sit on the same board as your own, so a vehicle at a specialist is not invisible until its invoice turns up.
Book-on, book-off time
Captures real labour per technician per job, which is how you learn that the two-hour quote has been a five-hour job for a year.
One workshop load board
Every vehicle on site with its bay, its state and the name of whoever is on it. The whiteboard, legible to the supervisor's stand-in.
Repeat-visit history
Each visit stays attached to the vehicle, so the fourth time a fault returns you can read the three previous attempts and what was fitted.
How it works
How KO Fleetz does it
Step 1: Model the workshop
Define bays, lifts, shift patterns and technicians with their sign-offs. That is the capacity the schedule is allowed to spend, and the only capacity it will offer.
Step 2: Point every source at one queue
Preventive services, inspection defects, breakdown follow-ups and driver reports all arrive in the same queue instead of four competing lists.
Step 3: Sequence against real load
The supervisor assigns jobs to bays and people with parts availability and required skill on the card, so nothing starts that cannot finish.
Step 4: Book time and close out
Technicians record hours and outcome against the job. The vehicle's state moves and the labour becomes data rather than an impression.
Outcomes
What changes
- Waiting time separated from working time
- Visible queue
- Every vehicle on site, in one place
- One board
- Labour captured per job, not estimated
- Real hours
- The floor runs when the supervisor is away
- Clean handover
Frequently asked questions
A work order is one job on one vehicle: the fault, the tasks, the parts, the sign-off. Workshop management is the floor those jobs compete for. It answers a different question — not what is wrong with this truck, but which of the eleven trucks gets the bay at eight tomorrow, who is qualified to do it, and what happens to the other ten. Most fleets need both, and they meet at the point where a work order gets a bay and a name against it.
No, and that is deliberate. Auto-sequencing a workshop requires knowing that a driver is waiting on site, that one customer will not tolerate another day, and that only one fitter will touch a particular gearbox. None of that is in the data. KO Fleetz makes the constraint visible — hours committed against hours available, jobs blocked on parts, skills that are the real bottleneck — and leaves the ordering to the person who knows the yard.
Less of it, honestly. With no bays and no technicians of your own, bay allocation and skill matching do nothing for you. What still earns its place is the state tracking and the clock: which vehicles are at which garage, how long each has been there, what was quoted against what was invoiced, and which supplier consistently keeps a vehicle three days longer than the next one. If you never bring work in-house, expect to use about half the module.
Yes. Booking on and off, recording what was found, requesting parts and moving a job's state are built for a phone or a tablet with dirty hands, not for a desk. This matters more than it sounds. If time capture only happens in the office at the end of the day, it gets reconstructed from memory, and reconstructed labour hours are worth roughly nothing when you later try to work out why jobs overrun.
The job moves to awaiting parts and stops consuming the bay in the capacity view, because it is not consuming a technician either. The parts request links to the store, and when the part is received the job returns to the schedulable queue. This is the single biggest reason workshop throughput reporting is wrong elsewhere: the days spent waiting get counted as work in progress and the queue looks busier than it is. See Spare Parts & Inventory for the stock side of that.
They arrive and they break it, the same as they do now. What changes is that you can see what they broke. When a breakdown recovery takes a bay on Wednesday, the jobs it displaced are visibly displaced rather than silently late, and the preventive services pushed out are flagged before they become overdue. Roadside events feed in through Breakdown Management, so a temporary fix at the kerb raises a proper follow-up job here.
See your own workshop on one board
Bring last month's job list and your bay count. We will show you where the queue actually went and how much of it was waiting rather than working.