Executive Summary

Independent repair shops and multi-bay service centers worldwide routinely lose or never capture complete vehicle repair histories: paper work orders, OEM printouts, and technician notes sit in filing cabinets or fragmented desktop systems, creating blind spots for diagnostics, parts ordering, warranty claims, and customer lifetime value. This problem affects roughly 1.6 million shops globally and leads to revenue leakage, repeat repairs, and lower margin upsells when past fixes and parts histories aren’t accessible at point of service. The product would be a cloud SaaS "digital garage" that automatically ingests paper and PDF work orders, emails, and technician notes via OCR + LLM parsing into a structured vehicle repair history tied to VINs, customers, and line-items; core features would include a searchable timeline, parts & labor standardized coding, integrations with DMS/POS, parts suppliers, and optional analytics for recurring failures and warranty recovery. Positioning would emphasize an easy onboarding flow with human-in-loop validation to hit enterprise-grade accuracy, a $6K estimated average contract value for larger multi-shop customers, and modular pricing for single-bay independents. Now is a strong window to pursue this: the estimated addressable market is about $9.6B (1.6M shops x $6K ACV), market score 92/100 and revenue potential 90/100 reflect that shops are shifting to cloud SaaS and that AI OCR/LLM tooling materially lowers the cost of converting paper into structured records. EV adoption and rising vehicle complexity increase the value of clean historical diagnostics and parts data, so buyers are more willing to pay for durable accuracy and integrations that reduce rework. Competition is medium—established DMS vendors, vertical accounting tools, and startups offer partial solutions—so defensibility will come from three things done well: a superior data pipeline (OCR + domain-tuned LLM + human QA) to achieve >95% usable extraction for VIN/part codes, deep integrations that make the history actionable in real workflows, and network effects from aggregated anonymized repair-data insights. Key challenges are integration complexity, shop change management, and privacy/consent for customer records; those require focused sales engineering, clear ROI cases, and conservative data governance rather than product-only optimism.

Market Opportunity

Lost repair histories? Digital garage management & customer records targets a $9.6B = 1.6M global auto repair shops x $6K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10% CAGR (digitalization of small auto businesses).

Key trends driving demand: AI-enabled document digitization -- OCR + LLMs lower friction converting paper work orders into structured histories.; Vehicle complexity & EV adoption -- increased diagnostic/parts data makes historical repair records more valuable for accuracy and margins.; Cloud SaaS adoption in SMBs -- shops increasingly prefer subscription software and integrated payments over legacy desktop tools.; Parts supply chain transparency -- real-time parts pricing/inventory APIs enable integrated ordering and faster turn times..

Key competitors include Mitchell 1, Shopmonkey, Tekmetric, AutoFluent, Workarounds: QuickBooks / Google Sheets / Paper.

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Lost repair histories? Digital garage management & customer records

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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