Family owned and operated since 2001, with over 25 years experience.
My name is AJ Bernhardt with Auto Body Concepts in Council Bluffs, Iowa and Oman, Nebraska. We have two locations. They are about 20 miles apart, family owned. I'm second generation. My father started the company in 1991. One of the main reasons we got Car Beat and we started looking at it was we needed a solution to our expansion. Our Council Bluffs location, we opened a, we got the building next to us. So we ended up doubling our size. They're right next to each other but they doubled in size two separate buildings. So we needed a solution for the communication between the two buildings that everybody could see without having to see it. They could not, So, So we needed that area to be covered. So I knew as soon as it was announced in 2017, I t So were the first ones at Omaha and really in the area to have the car beat. It's been great. We have two release meetings every day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon and we always meet at the main screen and we go through everyt We usually start right and go left so that we can, in the afternoon, we may only have to go over the car so it's quick, it's five, six minutes tops. We start and get to body or paint because we know that's only going to be what we can cover in that rest of the day. And if we've got a st So it's helped with a lot of the nonverbal communication. Nobody, there'still questions but technicians know what's coming down. They know, hey, we've got six cars and ready for repairs. It's going to be a little full. Obviously we don't now but they know that in blueprinting, my tear down, my disassembly teams, they're going to have some full days coming up. It's been truly invaluable. The return on investment is tenfold. So we use the reports. I use it with my blueprint coordinator and my shop manager. Just to go over some baseline KPIs, see where we're at, see what we can improve on. Obviously sometimes a cycle time is what it is but it's nice knowing what we can improve on all the way from average repairs. G's in the last month, we've had not Why is that? With having two locations, can we shuffle those around so that we're not just bombarded with the $10,000 plus repairs so that it's taken forever to get cars through. Cycle time, looking at days, being able to compare that with what insurance companies are telling us. We only have one DRP so we're kind of on the other cusp of non-DRP driven. And then we're also looking at going into OEM certifications. So knowing that we can look at what we're fixing, seeing the parts, how long it takes to get the parts in the average time of waiting and parts in the reports and we can see what cars we're fixing. So we don't go and get a certification for Jaguar Land Rover that we fixed 20 years of. We can look at the GM products and say, that's been our n So we also use the board during our production meetings in the morning and in the afternoon. All once a week just as a light hearted morale booster I guess. We pick somebody random. So anybody from somebody on the cleanup team to painter to body tech, we'll pick them to go through it. That's the whole idea of t I have a cleanup guy who's been with us for So we can see what's coming up, what's going on, what's happening.
