FARMINGTON HILLS, Mich. — MAHLE Aftermarket Inc.'s Service Solutions division is providing Christian Brothers Automotive (CBA), a chain of about 160 franchised vehicle repair shops, with an enhanced enterprise technician collaboration platform.
MAHLE said the platform, called CBA Connect, will allow Christian Brothers technicians to interact with and support each other within the organization when they need help diagnosing or repairing vehicles.
The platform is a customized version of the new MAHLE Forum, which offers a Web and mobile application for experience- and knowledge-based collaboration with built-in workflows, service information management, data analytics and diagnostic tool integration.
"We have had extensive experience and success using collaboration tools with our technicians," said Bob Augustine, CBA technical training manager.
"We chose the MAHLE Forum as our next generation tool due to the automotive focus of the platform. Our customized MAHLE Forum will enable us to support our technicians more efficiently, help build their continuous knowledge base and provide a powerful search engine to quickly find the information from past repair and service information."
The Forum also provides multimedia document management and document authoring capabilities for technicians and CBA trainers. Access to the platform can be achieved via the Web or mobile applications.
MAHLE said the customized application for Christian Brothers will provide repair support for domestic, Asian and European vehicles with VIN decoding/lookup capabilities and social media integration.
Technicians will be able to upload images, videos, audio and documents to illustrate the issue they are posting about.
MAHLE Forum can also integrate and support all Christian Brothers legacy data, the company said.
MAHLE Service Solutions — formerly RTI Technologies Inc. — specializes in the development and manufacturing of automotive tools and equipment, which are are used in major OE vehicle manufacturing plants and dealerships and by independent aftermarket service providers around the world.