Train new mechanics on your standards

Ask three mechanics in the same shop what a tune-up includes and you will get three answers. One checks chain wear with a gauge, one eyeballs it. One torques every bolt, one torques the ones that matter. The service manager knows the right answer, but it lives in their head and gets passed on by watching over a shoulder in a busy week.

Courses is where that standard gets written down and taught. A course is a set of lessons. Each lesson is built from blocks: text, images, video, tables, checklists, quizzes and assignments. A new mechanic works through it at their own pace, you see where they get stuck, and they finish with a certificate you can check.

Courses is part of erp.io, in the same workspace as Service. The two do different jobs. The Service checklist makes sure the standard is followed on every bike. The course makes sure a new mechanic understands it before they touch one.

Start with the tune-up. Write out your procedure in order: what gets checked, what gets adjusted, what gets replaced, and the line where a tune-up becomes an overhaul that needs a new quote. Add photos of what a worn chain, a glazed rotor and a frayed cable look like on your stand. End the lesson with a quiz that asks the questions new mechanics get wrong.

Torque is a lesson of its own. The rule you teach is the shop rule: every fastener gets the manufacturer's spec, from the manufacturer's documentation, with a torque wrench, and carbon parts get extra care. The numbers themselves should come from the manufacturers, not from memory and not from an AI. Upload the service documents you use as sources and turn on approved-sources-only, and the course builder will cite them or refuse, rather than inventing a figure.

E-bike safety is where a written standard matters most. Battery handling and storage, what to do with a damaged or swollen pack, isolating power before working on the drive system, the diagnostic steps your shop follows for a motor fault. A quiz gate at the end means nobody moves on to e-bike work without passing it.

The checklist and the course should say the same thing. When you build a tune-up template in Service, with its questions, photo requirements and required answers, write the matching lesson in Courses. When you change the procedure, change both. Service keeps each version of a checklist template, so a submission always shows the questions that were asked at the time.

Learners in Courses are not the same as users of the suite. A learner signs in to the course player with an emailed link and is not a billable erp.io seat. Your mechanic will have both: a workspace account to fill in Service checklists, and a learner sign-in for training.

There is no automatic link between the two modules today. Courses does not know which checklists a mechanic has filled in, and Service does not check whether someone has passed a course before letting them work on e-bikes. What you can do is use the workspace roles that set Service permissions to control who can build and publish checklist templates, and use the course certificate as your record of who has been trained.