Method and system for controlling body-shop processing

A computing system for controlling body-shop processing, wherein body-shop processing of each of a plurality of vehicles includes a sequence of body-shop processing steps, and wherein body-shop processing of each vehicle defines a respective body-shop processing job (“job”) having a plurality of job attributes, the computing system comprising:

• a touch-screen display;
• a processing unit;
• non-transitory data storage;
• and
• program instructions stored in the non-transitory data storage and executable by the processing unit to carry out operations for controlling body-shop processing of vehicles,
• wherein the operations include causing to be presented on the touch-screen display, a sequence of discrete display-sections representing, respectively, the sequence of body-shop processing steps, and, for each of a plurality of jobs currently being processed, causing to be presented on the touch-screen display, in a display-section that represents a current body-shop processing step of the job, a job-card that represents the job and that depicts at least some of the attributes of the job,
• wherein the operations further include receiving drag-drop data that represents instances of dragging and dropping on the touch-screen display of individual ones of the job-cards among display-sections, wherein each instance of dragging and dropping of an individual job-card from one display-section to another indicates that body-shop processing of the job represented by the individual job card has transitioned from the body-shop processing step represented by the display-section from which the job-card was dragged to the body-shop processing step represented by the display-section to which the job-card was dragged,
• wherein the operations further include determining, based on timing of the dragging and dropping represented by the received drag-drop data, durations of processing of individual jobs in particular body-shop processing steps, and establishing, based on correlations between the determined processing durations and the attributes of the individual jobs, trend-data indicating representative processing durations in particular body-shop processing steps for particular combinations of job attributes, and
• wherein the operations further include using the established trend-data as a basis to control body-shop processing of a given job based on a determination that the given job has a given combination of job attributes.