CMMS for car dealerships

A dealership maintains cars, and that makes it easy to neglect the thing you’d least expect: its own facilities. The workshop, the paint booth, the lifts, the compressed air system, the showroom’s HVAC.

These are assets that halt the business if they fail, and a good number of them carry mandatory inspections. This article is about that, not about managing vehicle repairs — which has its own article in CMMS for mechanical workshops.

What has to be maintained, and why

What stops the workshop. Lifts, the compressor and air network, diagnostic equipment, wheel aligners, tyre changers and balancers, fume extraction.

The paint booth. It is the most expensive asset and the one that carries the most regulation and maintenance: filters, burner, extraction, temperature control.

What affects sales. Showroom HVAC and lighting, automatic doors, the car wash.

General facilities. Electricity, fire protection, domestic hot water, hazardous waste management.

In asset management each piece of equipment has its own record with model, serial number, installation date, cost, warranty end date, location, and its priority, grouped by system, family, and model.

Lifts and the booth: where the obligation lies

This is the part most neglected at a dealership, and the one carrying the most risk.

Lifting equipment has mandatory periodic inspections, and the paint booth carries requirements around installation, extraction, and emissions. On top of that comes the electrical installation, fire protection, and hazardous waste management for the workshop.

It is worth knowing before looking for it in the menu: legal maintenance is not a module of GMAO Cloud. It runs on the general preventive maintenance mechanism, attaching the routine required by regulation to the asset, its model, or its family, and defining the frequency. The system generates work orders on its own, checking beforehand whether the day is a holiday and whether the technician or vendor is available.

The proof comes from the work order history, the completed checklists, and the documentation with its dates. The software logs and proves; the one who answers to the inspection is the dealership.

Usage, which does not follow the calendar

A compressor or a paint booth does not wear out by the month: it wears out by hours of operation and cycles. And at a dealership the workload is highly seasonal.

That is what the counter-based preventive maintenance is for: the asset carries its hours or cycles with a threshold and a warning percentage, and when a reading exceeding that threshold is logged, the system generates the preventive work order automatically.

It combines with time-based frequency, which covers what is due by the calendar — filters, oils, regulatory inspections — regardless of usage. A single asset can carry several schedules at once.

The windows: the workshop cannot stop

With a full schedule, work on a lift or the booth costs direct production time. Work goes to first thing in the morning, the end of the day, or lower-load days.

That is why seeing the load on the calendar and being able to drag work around matters. If rescheduling costs more than ignoring the plan, the plan gets ignored and the system stops reflecting reality.

Letting the alert come from the workshop floor

The person who sees the problem is the mechanic or the workshop manager, with their hands busy. If they have to go to a computer, they will not report it.

An incident can come in from a dedicated access point with a description and a photo, or from a mailbox that the system converts into alerts. With its type, priority, affected area and equipment, and a maximum time per status so that something urgent — a lift out of service — is not confused with something that can wait.

Vendors, which are almost everyone

Nearly everything is executed by outside companies: one for lifts, one for the booth, one for the compressor, one for HVAC and fire protection.

They are registered as vendors and receive the work orders that correspond to them, with their timing, material, documentation, and signature. Since licenses are unlimited across all three plans, registering all of them is not a financial decision.

Without that, the dealership has invoices but no case file. The executed annual plan report answers how many interventions were contracted and how many were actually done — a question that is rarely answerable otherwise.

Deadlines, which cut the most risk

Lift inspection certificates, booth documentation, maintenance contracts, insurance, waste authorizations, fire extinguishers.

The document manager attaches them to the asset, the vendor, or the work order, decides who can see them, and gives them an expiry date, with a daily check on what is about to expire and its corresponding notification. Certificates carry their number, scope, issuer, and holder.

Loading those dates takes half an afternoon and is, almost always, the first thing to pay for itself in the whole rollout.

The cost of an hour of stopped workshop

This is the calculation almost nobody makes, and the one that changes decisions.

When a lift is out of service, the cost is not the repair: it is the workshop hours that cannot be billed and the schedule that has to be rearranged. Against that, bringing forward an inspection or keeping a spare in stock is almost always cheap.

The history makes that calculation possible. Reports give the accumulated cost per piece of equipment, downtime, and how many times each one has failed — which is what decides whether a twelve-year-old lift gets repaired again or replaced.

There is also an automated feature built for exactly this: an asset can carry its replacement cost and a warning percentage, and the system notifies when the accumulated cost of repairing it exceeds that. It does not generate an order — renewal is a business decision — but it puts the figure in front of you right when it matters.

If you have several sites

A group with several dealerships or several brands has very similar facilities across sites. The maintenance plan is defined by family and rolled out across all sites, and reports by facility show which ones concentrate breakdowns and how much each costs to maintain.

Cross-referencing anomalies against equipment model is what gives you arguments: when a fault repeats on the same model across several sites, it stops being bad luck.

Where to start

With the equipment under regulatory obligation — lifting, the booth, electrical installation, fire protection — with its maintenance plans, frequencies, and vendors registered, plus the dates that are about to expire. The rest of the inventory comes afterward.

If you want to see it with your own facility, you can request a demo.