In my previous post, I described how the use of mobile devices can help improve Communication, Collaboration and Control in your dealership. In this post, let’s take closer look at some actionable examples a marine business can deploy that work well with readily available apps to help increase both communication and collaboration in your dealership while maintaining a level of control to keep everyone focused.

 

I have visited hundreds of boat dealerships, boat yards and marine service centers during my 12-year career in the marine industry. Dealers are resourceful, and I have seen many innovative processes designed to help with the flow of information. But most of these processes utilize a paper form to get information from one place to another. The problem with paper is that it does not transfer from one place to another easily. Not only does it physically have to be carried from one place to another, but the information written on that paper eventually needs to get entered into a billing or dealer-management system.

 

 

 

Scheduling people and events tends to be one of the most fluid aspects of running a boat dealership or boat yard. The schedule you started with at 7:30 a.m. is completely shot by 9:00. Things are constantly in flux as customer demands pop up, parts you expected to receive don’t arrive, equipment malfunctions and the weather changes. The most common tool used by both sales managers and service managers is a dry erase board and the eraser is used as much as the marker.

 

Many marine businesses have resorted to Excel spreadsheets to organize staff members, track employee time and maintain a schedule. Excel is versatile but it’s not a collaboration tool. While things like Office 365 have made collaborating and sharing spreadsheets easier, the problem is that it’s still a spreadsheet and not designed for coordinating and scheduling team members. Furthermore, they are hard to navigate from a mobile device and they don’t effectively alert team members when something is coming due.

 

To improve on how these schedule changes are communicated to your team, some dealers and boatyards have started to incorporate free tools like Google Calendar and Google Docs to share calendars with their staff, alert team members of when various tasks need to be started and communicate any changes rapidly to the team regardless of where they are located.

 

Google Calendar:

You can use Google Calendar to schedule and coordinate the daily job assignments and/or boat delivery schedule with your employees. Just set up a new calendar and start adding events as your jobs. You will need to include your employee’s email address as the attendee of the event. After you get your schedule set, invite your employees to subscribe to the calendar. Google Calendar has a native mobile app that works on both Apple and Android devices. 

 

From a management perspective, the ability to check your teams’ availably is powerful, plus you can assign a color to each person so they are easily recognizable on the calendar. This method works well for a team of up to 10 service technicians. If you are managing more than 10 team members, Google Calendar can be a bit tedious to navigate, as changes to the calendar are made throughout the day, and there will be constant changes; your team can see the most current schedule when they check the calendar.

 

 

If you have mobile service techs, one of the nice things about Google Calendar on mobile is that it integrates with maps. If you put your customer’s address in the event being scheduled for your technician, they can tap on the address and it will bring up a Google Map that will navigate them to the boat.

 

Google Docs:

Tasking your employees to do something with an event is great, but just letting them know what is supposed to be done for whom and where might not be enough. In a business as detailed as a boat dealership or boat yard, your technicians and sales people need more detailed instructions of what they are supposed to do and how. This is where Google Docs comes in. Using Docs, you can share documents, spreadsheets, photos and videos with your team. These docs can either be shared “read only” or they can be given permission to edit. All you need to do is email them an invitation to their Gmail address and they will have access to the document.

 

Both Google Calendar and Google Docs are free if you use a Gmail address. But most marine businesses want to use email address associated with their company’s domain name. To do this, the paid version of Google Apps for Work is required. This feature is $5 per user per month and includes a business email addresses (name@yourcompany.com) and 30GB of online storage for file syncing and sharing.

 

Microsoft Office Integration: 

As you read this you might think, “Hey, this sounds great but we use Outlook.” Not to worry, at MyTaskit we use Outlook as well but we sync our Outlook Calendars and Email to Google Calendar and Gmail. This is done using a free application provided by Google called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync).

 

Real-World Example:

All of this may sound good in theory but how can these tools be used in a boat dealership or boat yard scenario? One of many uses is how service managers schedule jobs for their technicians. A service manager can schedule jobs for the technicians by inviting them to a Google Calendar event. In the example below, I have created an event called “370 Sundancer / Ron Lewis / WO #500513”. The name of the event incorporates the boat name, customer name and work order number.

 

 

In the Description section is a link to a Work Order that is also shared with the technician using Google Docs.

When the technicians view their calendar they would see an event show up like the one below. Tapping on the event (task) takes you to a detailed view. Here you can see that a reminder has been set to 30 minutes before the event. You can also tell who assigned this task to you and whether any other technicians have also been assigned this task.

 

here.