A worked example
How a workshop gets off paper
Bayside Automotive: six bays, three mechanics, one diary on the front desk, and a phone that won’t stop asking where things are. This is the whole journey — sketching the phases, deciding who owns each one, choosing the fields — through to the day the diary goes quiet.
Today, every job is a sheet of paper
A job at Bayside is born as a line in the diary and a carbon-copy job sheet. The sheet rides the car’s dash into the workshop, picks up grease and a torn corner, and ends the week in a drawer. If the sheet’s on the dash, the job exists. If it’s slipped down beside the seat, it doesn’t.
Then the phone rings: “Where’s my car?” Mel doesn’t know. The answer is in bay 4, under the Corolla, in Dave’s head. So she puts the customer on hold, crosses the yard, waits for Dave to slide out, and carries one sentence back to the phone. Four minutes, sixty times a week.
Nobody at Bayside is bad at their job. A sheet of paper just can’t be in two places at once.
Step 1
Write down what actually happens to a car
One quiet Tuesday, Mel and Dave stand at the whiteboard and list the life of every job. Not how it should go — how it actually goes, for every car, no exceptions:
Six phases. That’s the pipe. Some cars clear it in a day; some sit a week waiting for a customer to say yes. But every car visits these phases, in this order — and the moment the list exists, every job at Bayside has exactly one place to be.
Step 2
A job is born in thirty seconds
Tuesday, 10:40 am. Sandra rings: the Corolla’s squealing. The intake form asks for exactly three things — who, how to reach them, which car. Everything else belongs to a phase, so booking a job never takes longer than the phone call that creates it.
That mobile number is the one the paper sheet smudged — captured properly the first time, because the form won’t submit without it. It’ll matter later. The card lands in Booked in, and from this second the job exists in exactly one place.
Step 3
Give each phase an owner and its questions
Two decisions per phase. Who owns it — the person whose job is to move cards out of it. And what it must know — the fields that have to be answered before a card can leave. Here’s the same card, Sandra’s Corolla, photographed at every phase of its life. Watch the answers accumulate.
Booked in
Mel finishes the card while Sandra is still on the phone — what the car’s in for, when it’s coming, whether she needs a loan car. And one magic question: “If it’s something small — under, say, $250 — want us to just fix it?” That answer goes on the card as the go-ahead limit. Remember it.
The phase has one gate: Dropped off at. Until the car physically arrives and gets its timestamp, the card can’t reach the workshop. The board never claims a car that isn’t in the yard.
In diagnosis
The first mechanic free pulls the card, and the card pulls them: who’s on it, the odometer, what’s actually wrong, what it’ll cost. Dave’s findings stop living in Dave’s head.
And here’s the answer to “do we always quote first?” — no. This phase has two exits. Inside Sandra’s $250 go-ahead, the card moves straight to In repair and the work just starts. Over it — and $612.40 is well over it — the card goes to Awaiting approval, because nobody at Bayside touches a car without a yes.
Awaiting approval
The phase where jobs used to die quietly. Mel rings Sandra with Dave’s notes and photos in front of her — not a memory of a corridor conversation. The SLA is the insurance: any quote still waiting after one business day turns amber on the board, by itself.
Two exits here too. Approved goes to In repair. Declined goes to Ready for pickup — a declined quote is still a car that has to go home, not a card that vanishes.
In repair
Two answers and two ticks, written at the bench while the wheels are still off — not remembered at five o’clock. Work done becomes the invoice line items.
Road tested is the quality gate that can’t be skipped: the card physically won’t move to Ready until somebody has driven the car. A brake job that nobody road-tested is not a finished brake job.
Ready for pickup
Moving the card here is the trigger — it’s what texts Sandra and drafts the invoice, without anyone touching a phone (more on that below). Mel’s only job in this phase is the money.
Picked up
Sandra collects the Corolla at twenty past five. The card takes its final timestamp — and then it never gets thrown out. Next time HJK482 books in, the whole history is one search away: what was found, what was done, what it cost, who drove it.
Read those fields again — they’re the questions Mel used to ask Dave, and Dave used to ask Mel, plus two the paper system never asked at all: the go-ahead limit and the road test. The pipe asks them now, at the right phase, of the right person, every single time. That’s the back-and-forth, gone.
Monday, 7:42 am
Every car in the building, one glance. Columns are phases, cards are cars. Dave reads his morning left to right. Mel keeps an eye on Awaiting approval. The owner just looks for amber.
Watch the Corolla: Dave has finished his diagnosis, so its card moves on — carrying the quote with it. And that Navara has been waiting on a yes for too long, which is why it’s glowing.
Inside a card, the phase does the asking
You’ve seen the snapshots. Here are the live ten seconds at the bench: Dave slides out from under HJK482, and In diagnosis wants its answers — it won’t accept “ask Dave” for any of them.
The button stays grey until the phase has what it needs. That’s the whole trick. By the time the card reaches Mel, the quote is already on it — she rings Sandra without asking anyone anything.
“Where’s my car?”, revisited
Thursday, 2:04 pm. Sandra rings up. Mel types the rego while she’s still saying hello.
A month in
The pipe learns the shop’s real shape
The board soon exposes a quiet lie: cards sitting in In repair while the cars sit untouched, waiting on a courier. A board that lies breeds the old habits back — so Bayside gives the wait a phase of its own:
It brings two fields with it: Parts ETA date and Supplier select. No migration, no consultant — the pipe changed on a Tuesday, between customers, and the cards kept moving the whole time.
Then the routine work runs itself
Coming soonRemember the mobile number the intake form refused to submit without? This is why. Today, the moment a card lands in Ready for pickup an HMAC-signed webhook can fire the draft invoice into Bayside’s accounting system. The texts and reminders below are how it will look once native connectors land — when a card reaching a phase will trigger three things and nobody touches a phone:
Whatever fires — a webhook today, a connector soon — runs on fields somebody was required to fill in at the counter or at the bench, validated then and correct now. That’s the difference between automation that works and automation that texts “Hi undefined”.
Six weeks later
The diary is still on the front desk — Mel can’t quite bring herself to throw it out. Nobody has written in it since March.
Your shop might not fix cars. Swap cars for claims, kitchens, candidates, or consent forms — the method doesn’t change. Write down the phases. Give each one an owner. Make it ask its questions. That’s a pipe.
Sketch your first pipe this afternoon
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