Shop labor rates have climbed past $100 an hour in many parts of North America, which raises an uncomfortable question for installers and shop owners alike.
Is it still worth having a technician call around to friends or industry colleagues hunting for a wiring solution, dig through YouTube, or search forums, when every minute of that search is a minute that cannot be billed?
At $100 an hour, even 20 minutes of searching costs a shop over $30 in lost billable time, and this adds up fast across a week or months of jobs.
Vehicles are also only getting more complex, while the genuinely simple jobs are increasingly lost to the DIY market, leaving shops to handle the more complex jobs.
Shops that want to charge premium rates need to back it up. Shops need quick access to correct wiring diagrams instead of guessing or asking around. This is becoming the standard for a professional shop.
This is where comprehensive wiring diagram platforms come in, and two names dominate the space.
ProDemand, sold through Mitchell 1 and offered to shops via Snap-on as ShopKey Pro, is an online repair information platform that gives technicians OEM diagnostics, repair procedures, technical service bulletins, and interactive wiring diagrams for nearly every domestic and import car and light duty truck on the road.
Its wiring diagram tool uses intelligent navigation with automatic wire highlighting across diagrams, so a tech can jump between related circuits without losing their place, and it is backed by SureTrack, a community driven database of verified real world fixes.
It is available directly through Mitchell1.com or through Snap-on as ShopKey Pro, with pricing generally running between $169 and $200 a month.
Alldata Repair is a cloud-based OEM diagnostic and repair information suite offering more than 300,000 interactive wiring diagrams covering upward of 44,000 engine specific vehicles, about 95 percent of everything currently on the road.
It includes unedited OEM data straight from manufacturers, technical service bulletins, diagnostic trouble codes, and recall information, along with a mobile app for VIN decoding and diagram zooming in the field.
It is available directly through Alldata.com, with professional shop subscriptions running roughly $189 to $209 a month on an annual contract, and a much cheaper single vehicle DIY tier available for home users starting around $20 a year.
At $170 to $210 a month, either one costs less than two hours of billable shop time, yet either one can save far more than that across a single week of avoided phone calls and internet searches.
For a shop chasing premium rates, that math is hard to argue.
