By Michael Nielsen, Editor & Publisher | 15+ Years in Diesel Repair
Last Updated: August 2026
⏱ Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
Sponsored Content: This article is brought to you by ShopView, a trusted partner of Heavy Duty Journal.
A repair group with three shops and no shared way of working is running three companies that happen to share a logo.
That sounds like an exaggeration until someone puts two locations' numbers side by side and tries to explain the gap. One shop shows better labor margin. The obvious reading is that one shop is better run. Often it is not. One location documents work thoroughly and the other does the minimum. One records technician time against work orders while the other clocks people into the building. One closes work orders weekly and the other lets them age for a month.
The difference between those two reports is a difference in habits, not performance. Any decision made on that comparison is a wrong decision made with confidence.
This article covers what changes when a heavy-duty operation goes from one shop to several, and what it takes to keep the three things that matter most consistent across all of them.
In This Article
- The Threshold Is Observability, Not Revenue
- Consistency One: Work Orders
- Consistency Two: Technician Time
- Consistency Three: Reporting People Actually Read
- A Test Worth Running This Week
- How to Roll It Out Without Stopping Work
- Where This Does Not Work
- What Tends to Get Fixed Last
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Where to Start
Key Takeaways
- The multi-location threshold is observability, not revenue — the problem starts the moment an owner can no longer personally see the work across every location
- Work order standardization has to be enforced, not advisory — a standard technicians have to remember is a suggestion; a standard attached to the job is a process
- Unbilled labor is the largest quiet loss in most multi-site operations, and it compounds with every location added because no single person is watching all of them
- Simple, trusted reporting beats sophisticated reporting — data nobody reads doesn't drive performance, regardless of how deep the analytics go
- Phased rollout by willing location, not worst-performing location, is the pattern that holds up when standardizing across sites
The Threshold Is Observability, Not Revenue
Two operations at the same revenue can be entirely different management problems depending on how the work is spread. One shop billing eight million is a floor somebody can walk. Three shops billing eight million between them is not.
The line gets crossed when the owner or general manager can no longer personally see the work. Before that point, a person is quietly covering for whatever the system does not do. They notice the job that has not moved in four days, the technician who seems to be struggling, the finished work order that never became an invoice. After that point, the system has to notice, and every gap in it turns into a blind spot.
Foothills Group crossed that line somewhere around its second location. Founded in 2017, it grew to four locations across Alberta with more than a hundred employees and passed twenty million in annual revenue. Along the way it went through four different shop management systems, each of which worked at the size it was bought for and broke at the size the company became.
That pattern is common enough to be worth naming. Choosing software for your current size is what causes operations to pay for a migration later, usually at the point when they can least absorb the disruption.
Consistency One: Work Orders
Work order structure is the foundation, because everything downstream inherits it. If two locations describe repairs differently, attribute parts differently, or capture approvals differently, no amount of reporting sophistication will make their numbers comparable.
This is exactly the problem ATA's Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) built its Vehicle Maintenance Reporting Standards (VMRS) framework to solve at the industry level — a shared coding structure so that repair data means the same thing regardless of who recorded it or where. A multi-location shop faces the same problem internally: without a shared standard, "brake job" can mean five different documentation practices depending on which location and which technician touched it.
The practical question during an evaluation is not whether a platform allows standardization. It is whether the standard is enforced or advisory, and there are specific things to check.
Can a process be defined centrally and published, with unfinished drafts unavailable on live jobs? Half-built standards reaching the shop floor is a common and avoidable problem. Are published versions numbered, so an administrator can see what has been revised and when? Does revising a standard leave work already in progress alone? If every revision disturbs open jobs, administrators learn to stop revising, and the standard rots in place.
Can retired standards be archived and restored rather than deleted, given that compliance questions arrive years later? And can common jobs be saved as reusable templates that carry their own required documentation, so following the standard is the default rather than something a service advisor has to remember?
That last one does more work than it appears to. A standard people have to remember is a suggestion. A standard that arrives already attached to the job is a process. Platforms built for commercial repair, including ShopView, handle this by letting a saved job carry its own documentation requirements forward every time it is used.
Consistency Two: Technician Time
The largest quiet loss in most repair operations is labor performed and never billed, and it gets worse with each location added, because the person who would have noticed is only in one building.
The structural question is whether technicians are clocked onto work orders or clocked into the building. If recording time is a separate act of discipline, it will be the first thing to slip during a busy week, and busy weeks are the only ones that matter. Multiple technicians should be able to clock onto the same unit independently, since a Class 8 job often has two or three people working different systems at once, and a service advisor should not be the bottleneck for any of it.
Industry benchmarks give this some shape. ATA's Technology & Maintenance Council runs an annual Fleet & Service Provider Average Standard Repair Time (SRT) Survey — now in its sixth year — specifically to establish baseline repair times that shops can use to gauge technician productivity and profitability. A number worth having in hand before setting expectations across locations that may be tracking time very differently today.
Then there is what you do with the data. Cody Hagel, general manager at Grizzly Equipment Repair in Calgary, which runs a shop alongside a fleet of mobile service trucks, described the use of it directly. Being able to monitor efficiency and see how long technicians take on jobs, and which ones are efficient and which need support, means the coaching goes where it will actually do something.
How Grizzly Equipment Repair boosted billed hours and revenue per tech with ShopView
That is the honest application at scale. At eight technicians a manager knows who is fast. At fifty they need a report, and the report is not for finding someone to discipline. It is for finding the technician who has been struggling quietly for two months in a building the manager visits once a week.
Consistency Three: Reporting People Actually Read
Deeper reporting is not the answer to a multi-location visibility problem. Reporting that gets looked at is.
One multi-location operator running around fifty technicians moved net profit margin from 7 percent to 15 percent in roughly a year after switching systems. The reason given in their own review was not a feature. It was that the data was simple enough to look at that it drove performance inside the shops. The same review noted that previous systems had felt like they needed extra staff just to manage them.
That is the sequence worth understanding. Workflow friction produces incomplete data. Incomplete data produces reports nobody trusts. Untrusted reports go unread. And the operation gets managed on impressions again, except now there is a subscription attached.
The metrics that matter at this size are unglamorous. Technician efficiency measured as actual hours against billed. Labor margin by job, by service advisor, and by technician. Parts margin by job. Work order aging. Revenue per technician. The value is not in the sophistication of the calculation. It is in every location producing those numbers the same way, which is why standardizing the process comes before comparing the shops — as covered in this breakdown of repair shop reporting software.
A Test Worth Running This Week
The Handoff Test. A repair record is finished when the customer could read it without calling to have it explained. Four questions:
- Does every failed or flagged item have a photo?
- Does every measurement have a unit and a status?
- Would the technician's comment make sense to someone who was not in the bay?
- Is anything flagged for monitoring explained well enough to justify a follow-up visit?
Pull ten closed jobs from last month at each location and run it. Two things usually come out. First, the pass rate is lower than expected. Second, it differs by location, which is the consistency problem showing itself in the one place fleet customers actually see.
How to Roll It Out Without Stopping Work
Phased implementation is the pattern that holds up. Do not convert every location at once.
Foothills Group rolled out at one shop first. Billing at that location increased 25 percent within a few months, according to Chris Ward, and only then did the company expand, using the pilot location's staff as trainers for the next site. Across locations, Ward reports more than ten hours a week saved at the service desks and roughly fifteen thousand dollars a month in additional revenue across two of them.
How Foothills Group scaled to $20M+ with ShopView
The sequence:
- Map the current flow from intake to invoice on paper, before anyone logs in
- Clean customer, unit, technician, and parts data, because migrating a mess produces a mess
- Choose the pilot location by manager willingness rather than by worst numbers, because an advocate is more useful than a rescue
- Train each role only on the tasks they touch daily
- Review job status and time entries daily for the first two weeks, then weekly
- Measure labor capture, invoice speed, and work order aging against the old baseline before deciding anything
- Expand using the pilot location's people as trainers
Smaller operations see the same pattern at a different scale. Short Track Equipment, an eleven-person operation in Edmonton, reported more than twenty hours a week saved and over twenty thousand dollars in additional monthly revenue after consolidating its workflow.
Where This Does Not Work
Worth saying before anyone commits to it.
None of it survives a manager who does not look. A weekly review where each location presents its own numbers is the step that makes the rest function. Without it, the platform is a filing cabinet with a login, and that outcome happens at shops running perfectly capable software.
Technicians resist the first two weeks, and some of that resistance is legitimate. A technician with five hundred paper inspections behind them genuinely is faster on paper for a while. The gap closes, and it only closes if a manager holds the line during the period when it has not closed yet.
Existing data is usually worse than expected. Duplicate customers, units entered three different ways, parts with no naming convention. Cleaning it is the least interesting task in the project and the single biggest factor in whether month one feels like progress.
A single-bay operation invoicing from memory does not need any of this yet. It becomes urgent the first week the shop is too busy to remember the hours. The argument for building the habit early is that adding a technician to a system you trust is straightforward, and adding one to disorder is not.
And a platform that fits only the current size will cost money again. That is the trap behind most of the migrations in this industry, including the four that preceded Foothills Group building its own answer.
What Tends to Get Fixed Last
Most groups address parts visibility first, because the money is physically visible on a shelf in the wrong building. The reporting problem surfaces afterwards, when someone tries to compare two shops and cannot explain the difference.
The order does not matter much. Noticing that the two problems are the same problem does.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does a heavy-duty repair operation actually need multi-location shop management software?
The trigger isn't a revenue number — it's the point where an owner or GM can no longer personally see the work happening at every location. For most groups that happens around the second or third location, well before annual revenue reaches eight figures. Below that threshold, informal oversight can still catch problems; above it, gaps in the system become invisible blind spots.
What is a good technician efficiency benchmark for a multi-location diesel repair shop?
Industry benchmarking exists specifically for this — ATA's Technology & Maintenance Council runs an annual Standard Repair Time (SRT) survey establishing baseline repair times across hundreds of common labor tasks. That kind of benchmark is only meaningful if every location measures efficiency the same way — clocking time against work orders rather than against building attendance — which is the standardization problem this article covers.
Should a multi-location repair group roll out new software to every shop at once?
No — phased rollout, one location at a time, consistently outperforms an all-at-once conversion. Choosing the first location by manager willingness rather than by which shop has the worst numbers tends to produce a genuine advocate who can train the next site's staff, rather than a rescue effort that struggles to build momentum.
Where to Start
If you run more than one shop and cannot say with confidence why one location's margin differs from another's, that is the place to begin, and it is a documentation question before it is a performance question.
Three things are worth doing in the next month, none of which require buying anything. Run the Handoff Test on ten closed jobs at each location and compare the pass rates. Pull the oldest open work orders at every site and find out how old they actually are. And ask each location how technician time gets recorded, then check whether the answers match.
Whatever those three turn up will tell you more than a software demo will, and they will tell you whether the problem you have is a tooling problem or a process one. Usually it is both, and the tooling is what decides whether the process holds when the shop gets busy.
ShopView was built by heavy-duty shop owners who ran into these problems across four locations of their own. If you want to see how work orders, technician time, and reporting stay consistent across sites, you can start a free trial with full access for fourteen days, or book a demo and bring a real job from last week to build in it.
A trusted partner of Heavy Duty Journal.
Know an Owner Running Multiple Shops?
If you manage or advise a repair operation running more than one location, this framework for keeping work orders, technician time, and reporting consistent could save real money before the next margin review.
