 Modern repair shops use a variety of high-tech scanning, diagnostic, repair and shop management systems and tools to operate. Many of these systems require managers and technicians to enter redundant vehicle and customer information. All of that re-keying can eat up valuable time or even lead to data entry errors. The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) came up with fix several years ago to help shops network these disparate systems: i.SHOP, a technology standard that allows diagnostic tools and other systems to pull data about the vehicles and customers from the shop management system automatically, so technicians don't have to waste time re-typing that information. The solution can run on both wired and wireless networks, and since it's initial introduction several years ago many of the major shop management and diagnostic system providers have made their products i.SHOP-compliant. Martin's Automotive Center in Mount Vernon, Ill., is using a number of systems that have been connected via i.SHOP. According to owner Al Martin, his R.O. Writer shop management software is connected to Delphi DS800 computer workflow management and vehicle diagnostic system, ALLDATA repair software, and a NapaFix/IdentiFix diagnostic system. Eventually, the shop's OTC EVO scan tool will also be integrated via i.SHOP. Martin heard about i.SHOP years ago, and was ready to deploy it as soon as he learned the Delphi system was available with i.SHOP support. He ultimately installed the R.O. Writer system specifically because of the i.SHOP functionality, replacing his existing shop management system.
But many shops have yet to take advantage of i.SHOP, in part because the technology isn't very well known yet, and in part because a number of systems vendors have held off on i.SHOP integration. The problem was that the initial iterations of i.SHOP utilized a communication technology called COM/DCOM that, by the time the standard was available, many solution providers weren't interested in supporting. Several decided to hold off on i.SHOP support until a new version was available. "Quite frankly, we're not where we hoped to be with adoption," says Ben Johnson, senior product marketing manager at ALLDATA and chairman of the i.SHOP technical committee at AAIA. "Part of that was due to the i.SHOP interfaces. By the time we got it done, a lot of developers knew that COM/DCOM wasn't going to be long-lived." i.SHOP 3, which debuted early in 2009, is a Web services-based platform, making it more developer-friendly. "It doesn't care where the information source might be," Johnson says. "Anywhere the information is available, we can find it, and it gives a standardize method for all of these systems to talk to each other." No More Re-Keying For shops that have already implemented i.SHOP-compliant solutions, the benefits have been substantial. First and foremost, i.SHOP saves keystrokes. Once customer and vehicle information is entered into the shop management system, all connected systems and diagnostic tools have immediate access to that same information. "It takes between two and four minutes per vehicle just to key in data that's already known to the shop," Johnson says. "And a lot of technicians are not great typists. i.SHOP helps improve efficiency and accuracy." "You have a central repository for all of that data, whether it came from a scanner or a Delphi device or an alignment machine," says Rick Stermole, director of R.O. Writer at Progressive Automotive Systems. "You have the customer's history all together in one place. It moves the shop closer to being a truly paperless environment." "What I like about it is that when I run a Service Bay Quality Control (SBQC) test with my Delphi system, it saves the results to the invoice," says John Jobst, owner Schaumburg Automedics in Schaumburg, Ill. "If I need to recall a file, it's easy to find it." Jobst has been using i.SHOP with his Delphi and R.O. Writer systems for six years, and hopes to get the company's Hunter alignment machine integrated with i.SHOP soon. "It saves us keystrokes left and right," Jobst says. "I don't have to go between the Delphi and R.O. Writer systems separately." Because all of the diagnostic reports are stored within the shop management system, it's much easier for staff to find all reports associated with a particular invoice without having to check several separate PCs, or worse, dig through paper files. "You really get results down the road from your implementation," Martin says. "If somebody comes in three months later and wants the results of the SBQC, we can look at those reports. It makes data retrieval a lot easier." Prior to i.SHOP, diagnostic reports were printed and attached to invoices. "If you had to find something from a year ago or more, it was almost impossible, or it was just too time consuming," Martin says. Adoption Still Slow It will take time for i.SHOP compliant devices to work their way into a lot of shops. "An alignment machine is a price piece of equipment," Stermole says. "If that machine predates i.SHOP, you're not going to pay to upgrade that equipment until it's time to buy new equipment." "We're not hearing from shop owners that they need to have it, which is why a lot of vendors haven't added that support," Johnson says, adding that a adoption by a prominent national account would help boost the standard's profile. In the meantime, AAIA is promoting the standard through its education programs and at a special exhibit at the AAPEX show in Las Vegas in November. The "Shop of Tomorrow" presentation at AAPEX included wireless diagnostics and i.SHOP integration between ALLDATA, Hunter Engineering, Garage Operator, and WHI Solutions, as well as a demonstration of how telematics can be integrated with these systems to help drive business into repair shops. "We're still educating people on the benefits of i.SHOP," Stermole says. "We have customers that heard that maybe this type of functionality is available, but they don't really know what i.SHOP is. Once you show them what's possible, the benefits are obvious."
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