Executive Summary
Marshall Truck Bodies, a commercial body builder based in Manchester, has seen significant growth in recent years. However, their operating processes—relying on multiple shared spreadsheets—were remnants from when the company was smaller with fewer staff. The aim was to update their systems to better handle the increased volume of work.
Overview
Customer: Marshall Truck Bodies
Industry: Commercial Vehicle Body Manufacturer
Company Profile: Marshall Truck Bodies operates a large site, with capacity to build up to 10 trucks simultaneously. They purchase raw materials and invoice for labour and parts as part of their vehicle repair workshop operations.
Challenges and Objectives
The primary objective for Marshall was to streamline their processes while providing business decision-makers with a comprehensive overview of day-to-day operations. Their challenges included the use of multiple spreadsheets, duplicative work, and difficulty attributing goods and labour to specific builds. Accurately determining the total cost of each body build—including raw materials, labour, and parts—was essential for competitive pricing.
Invoicing was another issue, as it was entirely manual, leading to delays that adversely affected cash flow. Given the high cost of their products, it was crucial for company decision-makers to approve completed orders and ensure the final billed cost was accurate.
Solution
The solution was Autovolt’s “Workshop” product. Autovolt Workshop allows for the creation of orders to be worked on over time, with the allocated build passed to different personnel as it progresses through the process. This system ensured that anyone could see the status of a build at any stage, eliminating the need for duplicative work as everyone shared one system. The workflow
could be filtered to show only the relevant build to the corresponding personnel.
Marshall Truck Bodies also utilises Xero. Thanks to Autovolt’s Xero integration, all completed invoices are automatically created on the same day and emailed to the customer instantly using Xero’s functionality. This feature allows Marshall to accurately report the margin on parts sold in the vehicle repairs workshop, and view reports showing the overall margin for every build or vehicle
registration.
Results
After transitioning to Autovolt, Marshall has been able to redeploy two full-time members of staff previously responsible for typing up workshop orders and creating invoices. They can now maintain an overview of historical and in-progress work via the dashboard and use the margin and transaction reports to understand in real-time how much profit they are making per job and even per technician.
Key Features Used
- Autovolt Workshop
- Excel Reports
- Automatic Invoicing
- Workflow Filtering
- Xero Integration
