Frank Brown Motors

Frank Brown Motors has been looking after drivers in Allestree, Duffield and the wider Derby area since 1956. The garage works on all makes and models, covering MOT tests, servicing, diagnostics, brakes, clutches, cambelts and timing belts, and has since added electric vehicle servicing and repair. Locally, it positions itself as a main dealer alternative at a more reasonable price.

Seven decades of refining the same operation leaves a mark on how a business runs. Jobs move through the workshop in a particular order, and the front desk handles customers in a particular way. None of that is accidental. It is what seventy years of practice produces.

That is exactly the kind of garage most management systems struggle with. The team was not looking for software that would hand them somebody else's process. They were looking for software that could be shaped around their own.

Frank Brown Motors had heard the usual pitch before. As they put it, the industry norm is "this is our system, change your business to fit around our system".

For a garage that already runs well, that is a poor trade. Rewriting the way the workshop takes bookings, or the way the front desk handles a customer, in order to satisfy a piece of software means giving up process that was built on years of experience. The software becomes easier to support, and the garage becomes harder to run.

There is a second problem, and it only shows up later. Rigid systems tend to come with rigid support. When the thing you need is a small adjustment, something that would save the team ten minutes a day, it rarely feels worth the effort of chasing. So the change never gets made, and the friction becomes permanent.

Autopilot started from the opposite end. Rather than asking Frank Brown Motors to adapt to the software, the team worked with the garage to make the software fit the way they already operated. In their words, these are people who "will work with you so integration is easy".

Once the garage was up and running, they put together a list of five minor changes: small adjustments that would make the system flow better for the way their business works.

Three were done the same day. All five were complete within a week.

Support runs on the same principle. When something needs sorting out, it is a phone call rather than a form and a queue.

The measurable part is the turnaround. Five changes requested, three delivered the same day, and all five live inside a week.

The part that matters more is harder to count. Frank Brown Motors kept its own processes. Nobody had to be retrained out of a way of working that was already good, and nobody had to accept a permanent piece of friction because the software would not bend.

In the garage's own words: "Can't ask for more. Glad to be on board."