The company was formed in 1964 to prepare race and rally cars for Ford, who were embarking on their Total Performance motorsport project. After many successes with Ford in the 1960’s, including British, European and World Championship wins, the company was dormant for many years. In the early 2000’s Alan Mann went into historic racing and revitalised the team, which continues in the same vein as it was started in 1964.

A friend who has an advisory role in another similar company mentioned that they were trialling it.

For some time, we have been looking for ways to streamline the different aspects of our company, so for us, the ability to have all these aspects neatly combined in one system made GlobalWorkshop an attractive proposition. An ability to log all parts and labour through the same system and invoice these together would massively streamline this side of the business. Additionally, allowing customers to follow their projects with timeline updates would increase transparency of the unforeseen issues that are inevitable when working with classic cars.

Before going live with customer access, we took around one month to familiarise ourselves with all the system features. Then as updates have been introduced, we have been able to put them to immediate use in the day-to-day running of the company.

We have had very positive feedback from the customers that have used their access to GlobalWorkshop regularly to stay up to date with their projects. Also having the ability to choose between immediate update notifications or a weekly summary has been beneficial due to customer preference.

GlobalWorkshop has given us the tools to record labour and parts in one place and track them easily against project budgets. We can now create job lists and schedules across all our projects in one online tool. We can share regular updates with our customers with a great deal of ease. One of the most beneficial features has been to record our inventory of stock in the same system as the current projects, and charge parts straight to their specific job simply by scanning a barcode.

The overall time efficiency has improved as a result of the online system which all members of the team can access. This has increased the harmony between our workshop floor and office team. Having a digital inventory that can be linked to our projects has enabled better management of parts and saved us money in tracking smaller value items across projects.

The relationship between us and the development team at GlobalWorkshop has been excellent. Considering the time difference between us being UK based and the development team being New Zealand based, queries are answered within our working day, and if action is needed, things are almost always rectified by the start of our next working day. Also, the openness to suggestions and feedback on how to improve aspects of the product to suit our specific needs is not something we expected to see as much as we have. Having our feedback appreciated and acted on, to provide a better experience for us, has been very pleasing.

We are looking forward to the continuous development of the GlobalWorkshop product, in which we hope we can have an influence. There are some exciting features in the pipeline that we have discussed as being very beneficial to us. As the race season approaches, we hope to promote some aspects of our business using GlobalWorkshop’s Smart Codes feature, by making images and videos visible to the public at race events.