Peter Dods

In a recent column, I tackled “contextual inertia,” or the trap of letting AI polish your bad ideas rather than helping you build better ones. As promised, I would like to move to “level four” — the workflow automator. But in order to do that, I have a confession to make: I’m an AI addict. My gateway drug was a YouTube video by creator Nate Herk. He demonstrated how a PDF invoice could automatically download from Gmail, be read by AI and populate a database without any human hands required.

Repair shops are bursting with instruments this time of year, and they were all due yesterday. To have all your rentals ready, and to make customers happy come August, you need to find ways to increase shop production. Here are five tips to improve your repair shop’s output this time of year. 1. Reduce the number of rental returns your techs have to process. Not every return needs a repair. Assign sales staff to play test every rental return to determine if a repair is needed.

You need a highly productive staff to manage the flood of rental returns and school repairs that pile up over the summer. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, crafting financial incentives to ensure your rental fleet is ready is one critical step toward a productive shop. Effective KPIs are another. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) as a daily measuring tool of your repair staff’s effectiveness will increase your bottom line — and theirs.