Snap Shop: Steve's Auto Body
Location: Collinsville, Illinois
Owner: Mike Beshears
Staff Size: 18 when fully staffed, currently 9
Annual Revenue: expected $6 million annually
Average Repair Order: $6,000
Monthly Car Count: expected 83 cars/month
Shop layout is crucial to creating smooth, organized workflows that efficiently move vehicles through the facility for quick repairs. Steve's Auto Body used the construction of its third facility as an opportunity to specifically design the entire building around the specific repair processes that drive the success of its other shops.
Steve’s Auto Body opened its third location in the St. Louis area in June following a soft opening in May. Vice President Jordan Beshears, who is also a FenderBender Advisory Board member, says eight years ago, they went through PPG Green Belt training and started a lean process journey. The facility intakes the vehicles, disassembles them, and moves them through the repair process in a straight line.
“Everything in the shop has a certain place where it needs to be and then when you get into our paint shop, it becomes a complete closed-loop pull system,” Beshears says. “So, once a vehicle's in there, it cannot be moved. It has to get fixed in a certain order and then it just goes right out from prep to mask to paint to reassembly to detail. There's no jumping cars around and a lot of wasted movement.”
The new shop design is based off Steve’s Auto Body’s O’Fallon, Illinois, location, the first shop. They are also building a calibration facility, which will be a standalone business on a different property from the shop.
“We essentially built the process and then built this shop around our process,” he says.
“So, there's only a few minor tweaks that allow for cars to flow through the facility better as opposed to O'Fallon.”
When a vehicle enters the shop, it goes through "x-ray disassembly." There, the blueprinter and disassembly technician disassemble the car for repair. The shop orders the needed parts and, once they arrive, the vehicle goes through body repair, painting, and reassembly.
“We do have our higher-level techs come in and help with reassembly, but we have designated reassembly techs as well,” Beshears says. “And then it just pulls forward one stall into the detail area and then it'll go off for any sublet calibrations, wheel alignments, all that stuff to finish the process.”
Over his 18 years at the business, Beshears says they have locked in on the brands and products that serve their operations well. The shop uses Pro Spot for welding and, with many positive experiences, uses it for most other equipment as well. The paint shop has been and continues to be a loyal PPG customer, using Envirobase waterborne paint.
“Moving forward, everything will be Pro Spot in all the facilities. We have Car-O-Liner benches at all our facilities,” he says. “So, the same went in here and then Global [Finishing Solutions] prep decks and paint booths, which we have in other facilities as well, which have served us extremely well. So, essentially, Global for all paint booths, Car-O-Liner for frame machines, and Pro Spot for everything else.”
The shop currently has nine staff members, scaling up to 18 when it’s fully staffed. Beshears says they started with a smaller crew that trained at their other two facilities and will continue to build up to full staffing as volume increases.
The shop is located next to a GMC dealership and Beshears anticipates it will be a great partner for the business, and they will work on getting General Motors certification. Beshears says they will wait a bit to see the volume and types of cars they get before they decide which other certifications to target. Due to its location and design to optimize repair processes, Beshears anticipates the new facility will have a higher volume than the other two shops once it’s fully online.
“It is in a better area, but it's more because of the throughput with some minor changes that we made to allow cars to flow through the shop better,” he says. “So, we'll be able to get more done out of this footprint than we will with the other footprints just because of spacing.”
