What if there was a way to improve your shop’s performance – and possibly dramatically improve it – without making any capital investments or buying anything? What if there was a way to improve productivity and flow, relieve stress on your employees and improve your key performance indicators including customer satisfaction, all without spending a dime? Would you do it?
I’ve seen all those things happen – often in just 30-45 days – in shops that have taken some simple steps to improve how they schedule jobs into their business. These are shops that have said the thing that would most improve their business performance was having more customers, more repair orders. Yet when I first went into their production area, I could quickly count that there were far more vehicles than technicians, with many sitting untouched needlessly.
Now, I know some of those are vehicles were waiting for insurer approvals or other unavoidable delays. But too often out of concern about running out of work or losing a customer who may have been willing to wait a week, shops have stuffed as many jobs into the production area as they could without considering how many were coming out each day, completed and delivered on time (as promised).
Think about all the downsides to poor scheduling: a chaotic, stressful environment for employees; customers potentially driving by and seeing their vehicle unmoved from where they dropped it off a day or two previously; missed delivery dates (still the biggest customer complaint about this industry); and added rental costs (for you, your customer or an insurance company).
Is Your Shop Changing Enough? |
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Is your shop technology changing enough to keep pace with vehicle and consumer changes? It’s time to put your SMS in the palm of your hand and connect to customers and their vehicles like never before. |
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So what leads to the poor scheduling I see at most shops? There are four root causes. First and foremost, shops overestimate their production capabilities. They don’t really know how many units they can produce in a day, a week or a month, so they bring in more than they actually can handle.
Greed can play a factor as well: Let’s get that car and keys right now rather than risk losing the job. This fails to keep in mind that trying to make a customer happy by getting their car in sooner often results in that customer (or others) disappointed when poor scheduling leads to missed delivery dates.
A third cause of poor scheduling is that too many shops fail to leave space in their schedules for vehicles that are towed in or dropped off unexpectedly. I hear it all the time: “Things were flowing really smoothly until three more jobs came in ‘on the hook’ that we hadn’t expected.”
Fourth, despite all the years of discussion related to how problematic “in-on-Monday, out-on-Friday” scheduling is, too many shops continue to do it. I’m writing this column just a week after I was teaching a seminar in Atlanta where a representative from an MSO acknowledged his location continues to bring in nearly all the work for the week on Monday.
I also can attest to how easily poor scheduling can be resolved. The beauty is it doesn’t require a digital solution. There are a number of scheduling software systems out there that can help you track and improve what you’re doing and produce nice reports. But they aren’t necessarily going to fix the problem. Poor scheduling is really a management behavioral problem. All it requires is a decision that your shop’s performance will improve with consistent, even flow. Even flow moves faster. Jamming too much work into your system just creates speedbumps.
Next month, I’ll explain a simple system you can use with information you already have to improve scheduling at your shop. It’s a system I’ve seen shops use with almost immediate improvements in their business. One New York shop I worked with last May called me in late June or early July to say in a matter of just those few weeks, the shop had gone from stressful chaos to controlled calmness and even flow.
