CarShop

"The team have built us an exceptional work management and planning solution, which currently helps us manage the preparation of over 30,000 'retail ready' vehicles per annum 24 hours a day 364 days a year"

- JAMES DUNKLEY, COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR

CarShop is the leading car supermarket in the UK. Running facilities across the UK, their vehicle preparation centres employ hundreds of skilled technicians, receiving over 40,000 vehicles per annum, and working on vehicles 24/7 364 days per year.

CarShop were using a combination of systems and manual, paper based planning to generate work schedules for carrying out work across the various work disciplines on the shop floor. Paper and manual processes were highly prevalent and led to breakdowns in planning and lost opportunities for efficiency and optimisation.

A platform for rising demand

James Dunkley is the Commercial Director for CarShop. In 2015 CarShop were embarking on an aggressive growth plan to buy and sell more vehicles across its nationwide car supermarkets. With its primary refurbishment facility at maximum capacity James knew that existing processes were limiting the operational output and efficiency of the site. The organisation and board were under pressure to decrease the time taken to refurbish a car, and drive costs down.

CarShop's board tasked James with finding a solution.

Guiding CarShop to the optimal solution

CarShop evaluated a number of providers in the market before choosing Insiris. Working in conjunction with our sister company, toc, we knew the problems James and his team were facing. Working with paper and a lack of actionable data meant optimisation of the operation was difficult. Incumbent IT systems used across the group had to remain in place. Having completed a number of workforce digitisation and optimisation projects we knew that our partner driven approach, combined with our skilled engineers and technology platform would solve CarShop's problems.

A comprehensive transformation plan

We spent time working with James' operational and IT teams to develop the two part transformation plan. Our team were embedded at CarShop's site for a number of weeks to observe the current flow of work. We were able to help craft new processes for capturing, pricing and directing work. We recognised that an intelligent assessment and pricing engine would need creating in order to serve as the 'brain' of the new digital operation. Working in partnership with CarShop's existing IT providers we developed a robust implementation strategy dealing with over a dozen different connected departments from inbound vehicle inspection to production and manufacturing. Our team developed prototypes and tested handheld technology and new processes and algorithms with the CarShop teams.

The Platform for Growth

We implemented the transformative suite of technology and optimisation solutions over a 3 month period. Our engineers were on site to provide expertise and assistance and help James' IT and Operational teams overcome initial hurdles. Collectively we were able to deal with unexpected issues, resolving on site and very often, the same day. The new technology collects and manages work from handheld terminals and other sources, applying CarShop rulesets to price and then intelligently plans and routes jobs around the facility. Production controllers manage master production schedules from handheld tablets, intelligently guided towards smart scheduling decisions. Since introduction our technology has supported growth of 20% in new demand, serviced with the same number of technicians.

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