Garage Hive launches ‘Garage Industry Trends’

Date: Thursday 20 October 2022

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Community-driven garage management system Garage Hive has launched a new data website called Garage Industry Trends.

The announcement was made by Managing Director Ray Dilsons during his keynote address to a group of 230 customer and industry delegates attending The Blend 2022 conference at Birmingham’s Eastside Rooms on 17th September.

Garage Industry Trends is a new standalone service which uses aggregated data from opted-in Garage Hive customers to create key performance metrics in real-time. The beta version of the service went live during The Blend. Over 40 garage customers signed up on the day of the conference to share the anonymised data needed to power the platform, with another 40 garages opting in over the course of the next week.

The service will initially measure four key performance indicator averages; these are invoice value, labour rate, number of future bookings, and ‘net promoter score’. Each is displayed on the Garage Industry Trends website as a daily value, calculated on a monthly rolling average basis.

“Even in this early phase the data is powerful and useful,” said Ray. “Garage owners can compare their own figures with trustworthy industry averages to see how they compare at any time.”

Measuring something as simple and fundamental as independent garage labour rates reliably has always proved elusive until now. The typical method has been to rely on survey responses. These are cumbersome to gather, reliant upon information stated verbally and almost immediately become outdated.

“We’re averaging from actual garage labour rates on a daily basis and that’s never been done before,” said Ray. “When we show a value you can sure it’s real and it’s current!”

Over time, it’s expected trends of changes will prove insightful too, particularly given current turbulence around rising operating costs and cyclical post-Covid MOT booking volumes, which make performance even more difficult to benchmark for garage owners.

Garage Hive says the initial focus will be on helping customers understand the powerful future benefits of shared data to grow opt-in levels before rolling out more sophisticated metrics and reports in due course.

Garage Hive are keen to share their insights for the benefit of the whole independent sector. For more information please visit www.garageindustrytrends.com, or to learn more about the benefits of Garage Hive’s management system, please visit www.garagehive.co.uk.

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