Bayhand

An extra hand in every bay.

Your technician takes a reading and then stops working to write it down. Gloves off, walk to the terminal, type it, walk back, find his place again. Bayhand lets him say "cylinder three, one forty-five PSI" and have it land in the right field — checked against spec, read back to him, confirmed with a thumb button. He never stops working.

What changes on the floor

Four readings, one compression test

Today — per reading ~75 seconds
  1. 01Stop work, set down the gauge
  2. 02Pull off gloves
  3. 03Walk to the tablet or terminal
  4. 04Key in the value, re-glove
  5. 05Walk back, find your place again
5 minutes lost per compression test

Repeat four times on a four-cylinder — or hold all four numbers in your head and enter them at the end, which is where transposed readings come from.

With Bayhand — per reading ~6 seconds
  1. 01Thumb the button, say the reading
  2. 02Hear it read back, confirm with the same button
24 seconds, same test — drawn to the same scale

Hands never leave the job. The number is committed at the moment he reads it, not reconstructed twenty minutes later.

Confirmation is a physical button press, not a spoken "yes" — so speech recognition stays out of the safety-critical path. Any reading outside spec range is flagged for the technician, never silently corrected.

How it reads a number

Said once, filed correctly, confirmed before it saves

“cylinder three,one forty-fivePSI”
Compression test — 2018 Civic 1.5T
Cylinder 1152 PSIwithin spec
Cylinder 2149 PSIwithin spec
Cylinder 3145 PSIjust captured
Cylinder 4—not read yet
“Cylinder three, one four five PSI — correct?” Thumb to confirm

The value is read back digit by digit, because “one forty-five” and “one fifty-five” sound alike in a loud bay and “one four five” does not. Confirmation is the same button he pressed to talk, so no second recognition step can go wrong.

Every job, not just inspections

Wherever a number has to be written down

Compression and leak-down. Brake pad and rotor measurements. Battery and charging tests. Fuel pressure. Fault codes. Torque values confirmed. The findings, the cause, the correction. Anything that ends up on an estimate you have to stand behind.

Ontario's DriveON program made the problem more visible — mandatory measurements keyed into an MTO tablet at the lift — but the same lost trip sits inside diagnostics, brake work, and every repair order written under the province's 10% estimate rule. Bayhand is built for the whole day, not one inspection type.

Where the time goes

A light-vehicle safety inspection — we only claim the documentation slice
Today
95 minHands-on inspection — 95 min
25 minRecording & data entry — 25 min
With Bayhand
95 minHands-on inspection — 95 min, unchanged
Recording & data entry — 5 min
  • Hands-on inspection
  • Recording & data entry

20 minutes back per inspection  — the wrench time is identical, because the work is identical

We are deliberately not claiming the inspection gets faster. The inspection takes exactly as long as it takes. What shrinks is the part that isn't inspecting.

What it's worth

Two ways it pays, both of them checkable

Per shop, per year $21,500 Recovered bay time on safety inspections alone. 20 min saved × 10 safeties/week × 50 weeks × $130/hr billed rate.
Per 12 technicians, per year $33,000 Labour cost recovered from documentation gaps and rework. 15 min/tech/shift × 250 days at a loaded wage of about $44/hr.
Hiring pressure 1 hand Recovered time is the cheapest technician you can add in a market where shops are recruiting overseas. AIA Canada reports a persistent skilled-technician shortage across the sector.
Every assumption, and how confident we are in it
InputValueWhere it comes from
Safety inspection duration under DriveON2.0 hrOne Ontario technician's public account. Needs verifying shop by shop.
Documentation time inside that25 minOur estimate. We would rather measure yours.
Billed labour rate$130/hrMidpoint of the Ontario $120–140 independent range, mid-2026.
Waste per technician per shift45 minField-service research on clarification and rework from incomplete work orders. US data, not Ontario.
What we claim to recover15 minOne third of the above. Deliberately conservative.
Loaded technician cost~$44/hrA London wage of $35.45/hr plus roughly 25% burden.

These figures are transferred from other markets, and we would rather say so than have you discover it later. The offer at the bottom of this page exists so you can replace every one of them with a number from your own bay.

Straight answers

What Bayhand does, and what it doesn't

It does
  • Capture measurements, findings and the three Cs hands-free, straight into structured fields
  • Read every number back for confirmation before saving
  • Flag readings outside spec range rather than correcting them quietly
  • Work over the bay WiFi you already have
  • Run on a phone with a boom mic and a push-to-talk button — no new tablet to buy
  • Keep listening off until the button is held
It does not
  • Write into your DriveON tablet. The MTO locks that device to the registered inspecting technician and there is no third-party integration available. Your technician transfers the readings once instead of stopping four times
  • Replace your shop management system
  • Diagnose anything, or second-guess your technician
  • Come with your specific integration already built — we would rather build it against your system than guess which one matters

What a technician wears

Three pieces, none of them a tablet

His own phone In a pocket or on the bench. No device to buy, break, or lose.
Boom mic headset Mic at the lips rejects the bay. Hearing protection if you want it — the muff versions double as PPE.
Push-to-talk button Clips to his shirt. Works through gloves and grease. Nothing is listening until he holds it.

Roughly $150 to $250 per technician, once. The muff-style headsets cost more and buy you a hearing-protection upgrade at the same time, which usually comes out of a different budget line.

Why us

Built in London, for Ontario shops

Everything else in this category is American. The nearest competitor is in San Diego. None of it was built for DriveON, the MTO, or Ontario's rule that a final invoice cannot exceed the written estimate by more than ten per cent — because none of that exists where they are.

We are a Canadian company in London, Ontario. For an Ontario operator that means your integration gets built to your requirements rather than added to a backlog in another country, and the person who wrote the software can be standing in your bay the same week.

One bay. One afternoon. No cost.

We record your technicians with their permission, time what documentation actually costs you, and hand you the study. You keep it whether or not you ever buy anything. If the number doesn't justify acting on, we will tell you so in writing.

One thing we ask on the visit: what languages and accents are on your floor. It is the single biggest technical factor in getting this right.

asanka@hdsoftware.ca
HD Software, Inc. — London, Ontario