Last year’s Mechanex saw top garage owner Tim Benson become acquainted with Alldata’s OEM data platform, a partnership which is still going strong.
During last November’s Mechanex, Alldata’s Europe Marketing Manager, Julia Marra, struck a rapport with Oldfields Garage Owner and Mechanex seminar speaker, Tim Benson. After a presentation of Alldata Repair, Tim was persuaded to signup. Months later, Tim invited the workshop solution provider to his garage to see how he and his colleagues had been getting on with the platform in the real world.
Tim has invested significantly in Oldfields’ facilities, infrastructure, training, tooling and equipment. He is an advocate of OE components too. It was perhaps that desire to improve the breadth of knowledge of Oldfields’ staff and try to tackle every job that arrives in the workshop that led Tim to turn to Alldata Repair.
An annual subscription to the service gives instant access to all repair data, as well as Technical Service Bulletins, diagnostic trouble codes and electrical systems/wiring diagrams. The data is offered with an intelligent search engine (offering text string matching technology) to enable the technician to find the data they need in seconds.
The portal offers 91,950 make, model, engine, year vehicle combinations, which equates to 95 per cent of vehicles on the road today. In the last 12 months alone, 301 models have been published. The provider possesses a library of six million technical drawings and wiring diagrams, including electrical connector views.
The connection between Tim, Oldfields and Alldata arose following an encounter at Mechanex in 2022. Tim and Julia met just after a talk Tim was giving – about data, no less.
Tim was initially reluctant to trial the software: “Julia approached me and asked if I’d heard of Alldata before, which I had, but the perception was that it was complicated to use; however, after explaining the product in more detail, Julia persuaded me to try it and see if my perception was wrong.
“Obviously, using the original and unedited data from OEMs makes life a little challenging in that the manufacturers present and supply data differently; however, that’s perfectly understandable. Vitally, it guarantees that the data supplied, such as wiring diagrams or TSBs, hasn’t been reformatted or changed. We can have total confidence in what we’re being told.”
Tim goes on to illustrate how the system works in the real-world: “We had a fuel filter. on a Volvo, a type that we’d never seen before. The fitting was different to ones seen previously. It’s a job that we should be able to complete easily, but there was a particular clip that was unusual – it worked in a strange way: one pushes a bit up, then a bit down to unlock it. Logically, when one of our guys looked it, he pulled it but couldn’t undo the clip. Obviously, with the filter clip being made of plastic, there was the risk of it breaking it.
“We logged on and found the exact procedure for replacing the fuel filter. It showed the type of clip and how it opened. Before we invested in Alldata Repair, we probably would’ve broken the clip and ended up having to buy a fuel line. It’d be our fault and we’d have to explain that to the customer, which would likely be a tough conversation.”
