Adderley Green Garage Services

Adderley Green Garage Services looks after drivers in Longton and the wider Stoke-on-Trent area, with over 30 years of experience in the trade behind it. From the workshop on Anchor Road, the team covers servicing, repairs, diagnostics, air conditioning, tyres and clutch work, alongside local breakdown recovery.

What makes the operation unusual is its range. The garage is an MOT test centre for classes 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7, which means cars and vans, but also motorcycles, pick-ups, minibuses, large motorhomes and light commercial vehicles, for private customers and the public sector alike. It is a Good Garage Scheme member rated 97.4% across more than 380 reviews, an RAC Approved Repairer, and a member of both the RMI and the IMI.

All of which adds up to a great deal of history to move. Years of customer records, an unusually broad spread of vehicles sitting against them, and the invoice trail behind the lot.

Adderley Green were running on GS Onestop. Like most garages in that position, the thing holding them back was not the new system. It was the old one.

Years of trading leave a lot behind. Customer records and contact details. Vehicles against the right owner, carrying the service history that makes the next job quicker. An invoice trail that still has to add up when the accountant asks. For a garage testing everything from motorcycles to motorhomes, that is a wide and awkward body of data, and none of it is worth anything if it lands in the wrong place.

Then there is the team. A workshop cannot pause while everybody learns new software. Whatever the switch looked like on paper, the bays still had to run.

As Luke put it, they were dreading it.

The data went first. Autopilot takes the export from the old system and brings across customer records, contact details and notes, puts vehicles against the right customer with their service history attached, and carries the invoice history over so the year end numbers still reconcile. The whole lot is checked back against the old system before anybody goes live.

Adderley Green's import came back within two days, with every customer and every invoice where it should be.

While that was happening, the garage carried on working in GS Onestop, and a go live date was agreed for a quiet day. Then came training, built around how this team actually works rather than delivered as a generic walkthrough.

That was the part that settled it. One training call, and the lads were using the system the same week.

Two days for the import. The same week for the team. Nothing left behind.

The garage now takes bookings straight from its own website through Autopilot, so a customer can book without waiting for somebody at the garage to pick up the phone.

The part worth noting is which part turned out to be painless. The switch was the thing they had been putting off, and in Luke's words, "the whole process was seamless".