Greater Western Mechanical
From scribbled notes in the ute to a single source of truth — how a WA mobile workshop stopped losing track of jobs between call-outs.
Full disclosure: Greater Western Mechanical is owned and operated by the founder of TorqueOS. The workshop is the original proving ground for the platform — every feature here was tested in the field before it shipped to other customers.
The challenge
Greater Western Mechanical runs the way most independent workshops do: a small team, a ute kitted out for mobile work, and a phone that doesn't stop ringing. Customers call when something breaks — sometimes mid-job, sometimes at 6am, sometimes from a shoulder of the highway.
The system, for years, was a notepad on the dashboard or pure memory.
Lost requests
Jobs scribbled on a fuel-station receipt that never made it back to the workshop.
Missed callbacks
Customers calling for updates while the team was elbow-deep in another job.
Driving blind
No way to see what was scheduled, parts on order, or which customer had been promised what.
The work itself was never the problem. The problem was the gap between a customer asking for help and that request actually being captured somewhere everyone could see — especially when the person taking the call was driving between jobs.
The turning point
After missing one too many callbacks — and one too many late-night sessions trying to reconstruct the day's jobs from text messages and memory — the workshop went looking for something better.
Nothing on the market fit. The fleet management tools were built for hire-car operators with 200 vehicles and an office full of admins. The workshop tools were built for tyre shops with a counter and a desktop PC. None of them were built for the bloke taking the call from the driver's seat of his ute.
We needed somewhere to put a job the moment a customer asked for it — not when we got back to the workshop, not when the day was over. If it didn't work from a phone in the cab of a ute, it wasn't going to work for us.
— Greater Western Mechanical
How TorqueOS changed the day-to-day
TorqueOS started as the workshop's in-house tool. Today it runs every customer job, every service interval, and every parts allocation through a single dashboard that's as usable on a phone in the ute as it is on the workshop laptop.
Capture a job in 30 seconds, from anywhere
A customer calls while the ute is rolling. Pull over, open TorqueOS on the phone, log the job against the right customer and asset. By the time you're back at the workshop, it's already on the schedule.
No more 'did we promise that?'
Every quote, every approval, every note is attached to the work order. The customer sees the same record you do — so the conversation skips straight to the work, not the paperwork.
Services that don't get missed
Preventive maintenance is tracked by kilometres, hours, or time — whichever comes first. Customers are notified before a service is due, not chased after it's overdue.
A real audit trail
Time entries, parts used, photos of the job — all on the work order, all exportable as a PDF. Insurance assessors and fleet auditors get answers in minutes, not days.
The result
The notepad on the dashboard is gone. Jobs no longer fall through the cracks between the call-out and the workshop. Customers know where their vehicle stands without having to call to ask. And the workshop runs the same platform it built — which is the highest bar a piece of software can be held to.
Need a mechanic in WA?
Greater Western Mechanical takes on workshop and mobile mechanical work across Western Australia. If you're after the team behind the platform, this is them.
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