Try these process improvements in your paint shop

A mistake I often see is pouring off the scale. Although this speeds up the process in the short-term, it typically leads to leftover paint being thrown away, and it removes the opportunity to accurately bill for each repair order (RO).

The paint shop is your sweet spot — it is frequently the cause of bottlenecks and inefficiencies from underutilized resources, equipment, and training.

Often, paint booths are seen as a constraint, not an added opportunity. When the paint department is full, the paint booth is frequently under capacity, sitting idle for many hours every day. To get more out of your paint department, follow these guidelines.

You can’t improve if you don’t measure
We live in the world of data and no decision should be made without data to support it. Be sure that every paint job is being logged individually and recorded accurately. This allows you to improve mixing accuracy and generates the supporting documentation you need to collect payment from insurance companies for the materials you actually used.

A mistake I see often is pouring off the scale. Although this speeds up the process in the short-term, it typically leads to leftover paint being thrown away and it removes the opportunity to accurately bill for each repair order (RO).

If a painter pours on the scale with the RO number attached and logs the products and amounts used, the shop can accurately track the cost to the shop and reduce wasted materials. Mixing system software streamlines this process and increases mixing efficiency, leading to improved profitability from time management, accurate material usage, and billable documentation.

The 6S method is a must

The 6S method is a best practice that I look for in every single shop that I walk into. If a shop is not following 6S, they are not ready for advanced training and processes to increase efficiency beyond standard ability.

Sort: Eliminate anything that is not absolutely needed in your shop and in your processes.

Store: Arrange, identify, and organize your physical space for ease of use. Be sure you have a place for everything and everything is in its place.

Shine & Sweep: Cleaning should be a part of operating the business. In addition to regular cleaning, look for new ways to keep everything clean.

Standardize: Make standards obvious to your entire team and systemize the maintenance of sorting, storing, and shining & sweeping.

Sustain: Set discipline. Incorporate these principles into your culture. Schedule time to maintain standards and stick to it.

Safety: A safe work environment keeps employees in the shop. Safety should be a top priority, particularly in shops with heavy equipment, dangerous materials, and harmful chemicals. A clean workspace will allow clear walkways and personal protection equipment (PPE) will improve breathing quality in the paint booth.

Once 6S is mastered and sustained, we can look for further opportunity to streamline the paint shop and other shop processes.

Use all available resources

Manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and industry organizations all have an abundance of strategies to streamline your shop, but before investing time and money into those processes, ensure that you are maximizing the resources you already have on-hand.

A clean paint department increases the chances of a clean paint job (removing the time allocated to buffing and allows for more vehicles to be prepped and painted).

As a paint supplier, I look for shops that are crossing paint lines. If you are using a generic primer with a brand-specific basecoat and clearcoat, the coating as a whole will not be as effective (or warrantied) as when you use an entire branded line all the way through. Each paint line is engineered to work best with its ancillary products and you may unintentionally be causing yourself more work by combining product lines.

There is also plenty of multi-company technology that can increase efficiency such as UV lights. If you have UV-friendly products such as a UV primer and you are not using the UV light with it, you are adding hours — or possibly days — to your cycle time and missing out on hours of potential additional work. UV primer t echnology works in sync with a multitude of UV equipment, and the sun. Adding a primer like that to your stock can increase efficiency.

Be sure to evaluate your team as well. Do you have a junior painter that doesn’t seem to stay busy? Consider making him/her a prepper instead. The title may not hold the same esteem, but three good preppers can feed one good painter; Everyone will stay busy and it will increase efficiencies and, therefore, profits for your shop.

Simple, sustainable, repeatable processes will maximize throughput in the paint shop

When all is said and done, the most profitable, efficient, and productive shops run on simple, sustainable, repeatable processes. Once you have mastered measuring and making decisions based on those measurements, successfully implemented and sustained the 6S culture, and maximized all of your available resources, then you are ready for enhanced — or brand new — processes.

This is where your industry partners come into play. We have the ability to come in with an outside perspective and a wealth of knowledge to assess your shop, find faults, inefficiencies, and influencers, and teach your team to maximize profitability. Look to your industry partners to streamline SKUs and recommend equipment that will drive productivity and deliver exceptional quality.

Quick wins can come from processes such as:

• Accurate and consistent color validation with a spectro, sprayout cards, chip decks, and service formulas. Color should be matched proactively 4-6 vehicles in advance.  Ideally, color-matching is done at the time of disassembly for repair. This not only allows sufficient time to prepare the color, but identifies tri-coats and formulations that may contain specialty pigments early on.
• Quality checks before entering the paint shop:
  • All body repairs completed and finished properly.
  • All parts are present.
  • Vehicle de-trimmed adequately—paint as many parts off the vehicle as possible to increase productivity, provide a more seamless repair, reduce preparation costs, and allow for more ROs to be completed in once cycle.
  • All paperwork is present and current, including supplements.
  • Vehicle is clean.
• Using the right products at the right time, with the proper hardeners and reducers for the environment and repair size
• The booth is for painting, not for prepping.
  • Ensure all preparation and preliminary cleansing is done prior to entering the paint booth.
  • Painting should begin no later than 15 minutes after the vehicle enters the paint booth.
  • Paint should already be mixed for the job and ready to go.
  • If a color is not pre-selected and matched accurately, DO NOT put the vehicle in the booth—move onto another job until that one is ready.
  • Do not fully demask or buff the vehicle in the booth—as soon as the cycle is complete, move the vehicle to the next staging area for unmasking and buffing.
• Ensure the booth and paint department remain clean.
  • A clean paint department increases the chances of a clean paint job (removing the time allocated to buffing and allows for more vehicles to be prepped and painted).

Remember, with all of the new technology whirling around us and becoming outdated faster than tech students can be trained and enter the industry, the basics remain the same: Maximize your resources, measure everything, make decisions according to those measurements, sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain, be safe, and keep it simple and repeatable.