Any watch, whether it’s a cheap $20 plastic timepiece you get from a local dollar store or a $5,000 Citizen Eco-Drive One, is a complex machine made up of many small, intricate moving parts.
Each piece has a very specific purpose, and every other part around it is dependent on that one component performing its job. Some components, such as a subdial, have more central roles in making sure that the rest of the components sync up.
And, as anyone who has owned a quality watch before knows, if even one of those parts gets misaligned or otherwise out of line with the rest, the whole operation shuts down.
For some watches, all it requires is a new battery — 20 bucks and a little elbow grease, and it’s brand new. For others, though, it may need an entire overhaul, costing hundreds of dollars and taking weeks, if not months, to get back into tiptop shape.
You can likely see where this analogy is going: collision shops are very similar to the watches described above. Each technician and department in your shop is reliant on all the others doing their jobs correctly every time.
Bryan Harrell, president of Port City Collision in Wilmington, North Carolina, says that the parts department acts as the subdial in most collision shops.
“Nothing else can be done without the correct parts. It's extremely crucial that during the blueprint process and tear down that we create a perfect parts list,” Harrell says. “When the parts department functions efficiently, it allows the entire shop to run smoothly, leading to higher productivity and reduced cycle time.”
Unfortunately, if a parts department isn’t meeting expectations, it’s going to cost more than just a couple hundred bucks and a visit to your local jeweler to get it back up and running.
However, John Baker, director of operations for Wallace Collision Center in Bristol, Tennessee, says that making sure your parts department runs as smoothly is “mission critical,” and regardless of the expense, it’s well worth it to fix.
“I have always considered the parts department to be the heartbeat of our operation. If you're missing one part, that can completely stall a repair leading to delays in the repair,” Baker says. “That leads to poor customer satisfaction and a decrease in technician productivity, and that ultimately impacts the bottom line of our collision operation.”
Both Baker and Harrell, as well as Cody Rinaudo, general manager of Unique Collision Center in Gulfport, Mississippi, all recently went through a parts department overall process with Mike Anderson’s Collision Advice team. Though the overhaul was a major investment of time and money, all of them say it was well worth the cost, very noticeably improving the efficiency of their overall operations.
The Process
The first step in watch repair is to not only identify which component is causing the problem, but to also figure out how it’s affecting the rest of the timepiece. Similarly, Rinaudo says Mike Anderson’s parts overhaul process doesn't just focus on the parts department, but rather on where parts are and how they’re organized throughout every stage of the repair.
The process sorts parts into a Remove and Install (R&I) group and a Remove and Replace group. R&I parts go into numbered buckets and are placed onto a jacket. R&R parts are sorted onto parts carts, which are put into organized corrals. The process is designed to make it apparent where every car in the shop is in the repair process. The goal is efficiency, but shop cleanliness and organization are byproducts of that. The goal is efficiency, but organizing and cleaning up the shop are a big part of that, too.
“If I've got a car that's coming out of paint and going to reassembly, everyone knows where the parts carts are going to be in the paint shop slot,” Rinaudo says. “It's a very visual way to organize what parts are where and vehicles are in what phase of the process.”
For his shop, Rinaudo says a consultant for Mike Anderson’s team first came out to take a look at how the shop was currently organizing its parts, as well as what storage options and other equipment would be needed for the overhaul.
Once Mike Anderson’s full team came, they did a master class on 100-percent disassembly, disassembling every vehicle that was in the shop and building up each of the storage tubs and parts carts from the ground up. Rinaudo says it took his team of 17 people two full 8-hour days to go through the process, but he ventures a guess that it could take up to three or four days for some other shops.
Rinaudo says part of that rigorous time commitment comes from the fact that you’re not just moving things around in your shop, but instead you’re changing the entire approach to how you process vehicles pre-repair.
“When you go through a process like Mike’s, what you're doing is putting in place the core of what you're going to follow, but it's not a one-and-done thing,” he says. “You’re learning the ideas of what you want to do and what you should be doing. If you're not refining it constantly, you're falling behind.”
The Challenges
Harrell says that his first meeting with Mike Anderson, which happened at a Collision Advice conference in Nashville, Tennessee, didn’t go quite as he had envisioned it.
“To be honest, I left pissed off with my tail between my legs,” Harrell says. “The truth hurts, man. I've been in this business all my life, and it only took a few days to find out I knew half of what I thought I knew.”
Hearing that his shop wasn’t doing everything it should be doing was hard to hear, but after a phone call with Anderson a few days after the conference to talk more in-depth about how his shop could improve, Harrell says he was ready to take on the challenge of undergoing the overhaul.
The first step in that process was making sure that his team was on board.
“Your team has to understand the big picture, and it’s your job to make sure they see that and that you’re committed to the change. Throughout the process, I had to learn how to communicate better so they could see what I see and that's something. You have to do things with your team, not to your team.”
Harrell says from his technicians’ perspective, he was bringing in a drastically new way of doing things that was going to require a lot of learning. If they can’t also see what the payoff for such a big change will be, it’s going to be hard to get them on board.
Rinaudo says the best way to get that buy-in is to have a strong explanation not only of what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it now and why investing the amount of time energy and resources into this kind of overhaul is absolutely necessary.
“People need to have an open mind to change. Some people may be stuck in the way that they've been doing it for the last 20 years,” Rinaudo says. “Cars today aren't like they were back then. They're rapidly increasing in complexity, and our processes need to change to accommodate. The one constant is change, and if you don't change, you die in this industry.”
The Results
After his shop went through the process, Baker says some of the improvements were noticeable almost immediately.
“We no longer had a sea of boxes of parts and a sea of parts carts throughout the collision center,” he says. “Everything's a lot more organized now; there's certainly a method to the madness.”
In addition to the visible differences, he says it’s also helped alleviate his technicians’ frustrations that were caused by waiting on parts or having the wrong parts in the shop for a specific repair.
“It's been a huge win for our team's culture as well as our bottom line since going through this workshop,” he says. “Our collision center is operating at the highest level it ever has.”
Rinaudo says that while the process, whether you work with Mike Anderson or another consultant, is going to require a large investment, that there’s a pretty clear ROI if you think about it.
“It's costly. You're talking about at least two full days with Mike and his team,” he says. “But there's a massive return just in the pure efficiency of what you're doing. It's pretty simple math to see how that improved efficiency will help you move more vehicles through your shop.”
Harrell says his shop, like many others, fell victim to the habits and processes of his predecessors. It’s easy to do things the way you’ve always done them. However, he says shop owners have a responsibility not only to themselves but to their employees and future generations as well to make sure that they’re putting in the effort necessary to keep improving the industry.
“Mike Anderson talks about leaving the industry in a better place than when you found it,” he says. “Doing this process is one of the most vital things that we can do as an industry, to improve the business and the throughput, which also legitimizes everything that we do.”
Though it’s a lot of work, Harrell says he and his team think going through the overhaul process is “100 percent worth it,” and that any shop out there can get their parts department running like clockwork.
“There's nothing special that we did,” he says. “We’re just putting things that we learned into practice, and we’ve got a team of people that's totally committed to the outcome. That’s all you need.”
