Automated estimating inside R.O. Writer

Mechanica works inside R.O. Writer. When the technician finishes the inspection, the priced jobs land on the same repair order, and the advisor opens a ticket that is already built.

Key takeaways

• Mechanica works inside R.O. Writer today.
• R.O. Writer already compresses the parts chase into one screen.
• Without a draft, the comparison still happens once per part, by hand, on every ticket.
• Nothing reaches a customer without somebody at the shop sending it.

What does Mechanica do inside R.O. Writer?

A technician finishes the inspection and marks it complete. Mechanica reads the findings and scopes them into jobs. Labor comes from the shop's own Smart eJobs where one matches, and from published book time where none does. Parts are quoted at the shop's own suppliers and marked up the shop's way. The draft lands on the repair order and waits for an advisor.

How does R.O. Writer build a repair order?

Job by job, with the catalogs pulled in beside it. R.O. Writer's feature list describes Smart eJobs as letting a shop "design jobs that include all the parts and labor you need", and Smart eCat as a way to "check part pricing and availability from up to 10 suppliers instantly, all on the same screen and all at the same time."

Ten suppliers at once is a serious piece of engineering and it fixes a real problem. The parts chase used to mean three phone calls and a note on a pad. Now it means one screen, and the counter can see availability next to price without picking up the phone at all.

What is left over after Smart eCat?

The repetition. A comparison across ten suppliers is one action for one part.

Take a front cover job on a diesel. That ticket carries a gasket, a seal, coolant, a handful of single-use bolts and whatever else the procedure calls for that nobody remembers until the truck is apart. Fourteen parts is not unusual. Fourteen parts means fourteen comparisons. Each one is fast on its own. Together they are the reason the big ticket gets quoted after lunch while the oil change goes out at nine.

Then there is the part nobody counts: working out which parts the job needs in the first place. A catalog answers what a part costs. It does not tell an advisor that this particular front cover job wants new bolts because the old ones stretch, and that is the kind of omission that turns into a phone call from the bay on Thursday.

The where estimate time goes piece walks that arithmetic, and the single-use fastener entry covers the parts that get left off a summary and found during teardown.

What do the margin warnings need to work?

A price on the line. R.O. Writer flags low margin parts and labor for the person building the ticket, which is a good idea that depends entirely on the ticket being built.

A warning on an empty line tells nobody anything. A warning on a line priced from your own supplier at your own markup is a decision an advisor can act on before the estimate goes out, which is the only moment where acting on it is cheap. The parts margin entry covers what the number is measuring and the parts matrix entry covers how a shop sets it.

What does a drafted estimate change?

The state of the ticket when the advisor opens it.

The shop's own Smart eJobs get matched first, so the hours and the wording are yours. Work with no job behind it gets published book time looked up against the exact year, make and engine. Parts get quoted at the shop's own suppliers and marked up the shop's way. Each line names where its number came from, so a customer question gets an answer instead of a callback.

What does setup ask for?

Two passes. An R.O. Writer login with the permissions a new advisor would get, and a conversation about how the shop quotes: labor rate, markup rules, the Smart eJobs library, the brands your counter reaches for by default.

The library is where the effort pays. Shops that have run R.O. Writer for a decade usually have jobs in there priced under a labor rate from two increases ago, and those jobs get picked first by everybody, human or otherwise. The canned job audit worksheet finds them in an afternoon, and it is worth doing before setup starts.

Where should you read next?

The same shortlist usually carries Mitchell 1 and Protractor, and Mechanica works inside both of them too. The integrations hub lists every system it works with. The Tekmetric page lists the ticket shapes the engine handles. The vocabulary is in the glossary.