Maintenance plans and the Service Dashboard

Getting customers back after the sale

With additional work identified, Jenny turns to the next challenge: once equipment leaves the lot, how do you get that customer back for future service? A great service department is the first answer. Alex’s second one comes through sales.

Prepaid maintenance plans

Flyntlok already supports maintenance plans that can be structured and set up on equipment. As you sell a machine, you sell a maintenance package with it, paid for ahead of time. The plan is tied to that unit. A nightly update file highlights any equipment that’s due, so your team can reach out, schedule the customer, complete the interval and track when the next one is due.

An extra touchpoint with every visit

Each maintenance visit is another chance to work with that customer. Pair it with the walk-around inspection and you get a reason to look at the unit, talk to the customer and catch anything else while it’s already in the shop. Your maintenance checklist can also be a digital inspection form, so the customer leaves with a maintenance sheet. Jenny’s take: you’re pre-booking future service business at the point of sale, and owners love that kind of predictable business.

What a service manager sees first

Jenny asks what a service manager sees when they log in each morning. Alex says tech efficiency is one of the first things dealers ask about. Many still pull the numbers into an outside spreadsheet, clean them up, build formulas and present last month’s results to the team ten days into the new month.

The Service Dashboard

Flyntlok already has the underlying data. Every work order carries estimated, billable and actual hours by labor type, and those numbers make up your technician efficiency metrics. The Service Dashboard rolls them up for the whole department. In the demo, a five-location dealer group shows one row per dealership with three metrics side by side: productivity (hours clocked against hours available), efficiency (hours billed against hours clocked) and recovery (hours billed against hours available). You set baselines and goals, compare locations against each other, and drill into the reports behind each number. It updates in real time, so you can check it any day instead of waiting for month-end.

Why recovery matters

Recovery measures how many hours you bill against how many hours you pay your technicians for on payroll. It shows how well you’re using your techs’ time and your service department’s time. Alex puts every lost labor hour at $100 to $200 of revenue, probably close to $200. The more you keep techs in the bays working on equipment and billing their time, the more profitable the whole department gets. Jenny calls it the hidden profit metric: money you don’t realize you’re leaving on the table.