How to organize garage work orders?

[Black_Blade]

I have been working on weekends at a cab stand, where they have an attached garage for the servicing of all their cabs. Each month the cars come in for a servicing that also includes a safety inspection. There is old work order forms that have been photocopied so many times they are unreadable but are still being used. Each vehicle that is serviced (at any time) requires that one of these forms be filled out. They are then paper punched and stored in binders-binder for each car.
I was thinking that there must be a more better way to keep these records, for there is an old desktop computer in the shop that we use only for Mitchell Online Repair info, that could possibly be utilized to keep these work records on the computer hard drive. Maybe a pdf form of the work order form that you filled in and have folders for each car and store the pdf form into them.
There have been times when the owner had come back to ask about a certain repair to a certain vehicle and it took a lot of searching through all the sheets in the binder, for the handwriting of the guys is also not too easy to read on top of the many times over photocopy of the form.
Just wondering if anybody would have any ideas or suggestions I could check into, to make this process of handling work orders more efficient and easily searchable.

[waled44]

You could consider using a computer system to help store and organize the material. You risk the problem of the computer crashing and having no copy of the records at all because of being lost in the computer. I would recommend a combination of a paper and digital system. The computer could keep track of each vehicle, special notes about repairs, when inspections are done and due again, and other details of each vehicle for quick and easy reference. I would recommend that the binders for each vehicle get organized, as well. They should be easily organized in chronological order and a new sheet should be created for each inspection. This would avoid the crappy paperwork being impossible to read.