Portside Cars

Portside Cars Ltd works out of Unit 8 at the Canal Bridge Enterprise Centre in Ellesmere Port, and describes itself as one of the largest garages in Cheshire. The scale behind that is real enough: three MOT ramps and seven repair ramps, ten in total, running Monday to Friday.

The work spans major, full and interim servicing, diagnostics and fault finding, brakes, clutches, exhausts, suspension and wheel bearings, batteries and starter motors. The garage is an MOT test centre for Class 4 and Class 7, covering cars, vans and larger vehicles, and the team describes itself as carrying decades of practical experience.

A workshop that size does not have a single way of working. The front desk, the owners and the technicians each need something different from a management system, and all three need it at once.

Ten ramps generate a great deal of administration. Every job that moves through a bay leaves a trail behind it: the booking that got the vehicle in, the customer it belongs to, the work authorised, the parts used, the invoice at the end. Multiply that across three MOT ramps and seven repair ramps, five days a week, and the paperwork becomes a job in its own right.

At this size, though, the harder problem is not the software. It is the rollout. A garage with a full front desk, owners who need a view across the whole business, and a workshop full of technicians cannot be moved over with a login and a link to a help page. Each of those groups uses a system differently, and if any one of them fails to take to it, the whole thing stalls.

There was a third thing. No system off the shelf fits a workshop of that scale exactly. There were always going to be things Portside needed that the software did not yet do.

Autopilot went to them. Rather than a remote walkthrough, the team spent several days on site at Ellesmere Port, training each part of the business on the parts of the system it would actually use. The front desk on bookings, customer records and invoicing. The technicians on jobs and vehicle history. The owners on the view across the whole workshop.

The team took to it quickly, and that is the part worth dwelling on. Front of house, owners and technicians alike, which is rarer than it sounds in a garage this size, where a new system usually lands well with one group and badly with another.

Then came the adjustments. Portside came back with the changes they needed to make the system fit the way their workshop actually runs, and those changes were built. It is the same pattern other Autopilot garages describe, and at Portside's scale it counts for more, because a small piece of friction repeated across ten ramps stops being small.

Two things moved.

Admin time came down sharply. The trail behind every job, the booking, the customer record, the authorisation, the invoice, stopped being something the front desk had to assemble by hand across ten ramps' worth of work.

And the garage started booking in more work. Portside now take bookings directly through Autopilot from their own website, so a customer can get into the diary without waiting for somebody to pick up the phone, and the hours the front desk is no longer spending on admin are hours available for the work coming in.

For a workshop with ten ramps to fill, those two things are really the same thing.