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Good Workflow, Scheduling - Keep Cash Register JinglingPosted 11/13/2000By Patrick Paul
Whether you have a huge shop or a small one, proper workflow strategies and scheduling can make a large impact on your shop's bottom line and your customers' satisfaction level. With that said, the following will be of greatest benefit to small shops blossoming into medium-sized operations that are just beginning to require workflow controls. More advanced topics involving specific job processing tactics will be beneficial only after the principles set forth here are mastered. Workflow management is the controls you place on the process of repairing vehicles in your shop. Scheduling is the process of making drop-off and pickup appointments for those vehicles with your customers. These two activities probably make up the bulk of the shop manager (or production supervisor) workload at your facility and are closely intertwined. STEP 1: The first step to successful scheduling and workflow management is knowing your shop's capabilities. It is important to realize what your shop is capable of doing in a particular time interval. You must also know what your suppliers are capable of doing in a particular time interval, as they impact what your own people can do. After all, you cannot install a fender if you can't get one delivered when the technician needs it. Taking these capabilities into consideration will allow you to make the realistic projections needed for proper scheduling. STEP 2: The second step is to recognize and weigh the forces acting against you. The largest part of this can be lumped into the “Murphy's Law” category: If something can go wrong, it will. Some things are beyond your control (and furthermore, beyond your personnel's control), such as parts delays and insurance inspection and re-inspection waits. There are also items that are in your control, but can go wrong, such as technician mistakes that cause “redoes” or forgotten procedures or parts that require backtracking, therefore causing delays. The more items you can take control over by implementing preventative measures, the more you will lessen Murphy's hold on your workflow. This takes careful planning and implementing a certain amount of standard procedures that help reduce, if not eliminate, chance elements. What you cannot wrest from Murphy's grip, you have to at least account for and take into consideration so as to not overlook the possibility of things going wrong. STEP 3: The first notion to break is that cars go in on Monday and out on Friday. Sure, there are plenty of small jobs for which that sort of scheduling is appropriate, but most can be dealt with outside the constraints of a five-day workweek. The big problem with the five-day mentality is that you have a huge surge of work entering the shop on Monday, all of which cannot possibly be started on that particular day. Therefore, they end up being spread out throughout the week. The only problem is, some that start later on in the week won't make it out by Friday! What's worse, if those vehicles had been driveable, they could have been in use until you started them later in the week, and then the finish date could have been made later than Friday! After all, if the customer drops off his car Monday, the logical expectation is that it would be worked on very soon thereafter.
Larger jobs you should schedule on a case-by-case basis. Bear in mind that tow-ins will want a projected completion date as well. On these larger jobs, it is important to build in days for the time technicians will have to spend working on other smaller wrecks, as very few shops have a devoted “hard-hit” tech. It is important to realize that satisfied customers are largely customers who get what they expect. If you set out realistic expectations of when a job should be completed, you can avoid a displeased customer altogether. Many customers would rather be disappointed up front about how long their car may be in the shop than to find out after it has been in for repair for several days. STEP 4: Scheduling new work to come in nearly every day of the week will help you build up a workflow. The Monday-Friday scheduling scheme hacks up your workflow and divides it into weekly spurts. Conversely, daily scheduling creates a smooth flow of work in and out of the shop on all days of the week, which is actually much more manageable and causes fewer delays and off-schedule work, thus happier customers. It also tends to make for happier technicians, once they become accustomed to it. This method does not have your techs starting a large number of new jobs at one time, nor does it have them reassembling a large number of vehicles at one time. If they are paid on commission, it also allows them to have a more steady income because the flow of work is steadier. Managing this newfound flow of work comes in the form of setting realistic goals each day and making every attempt to accomplish them while maintaining a required level of quality. If you have a particularly large volume of jobs, it may be helpful to plan entire weeks of daily tasks in advance and to work up contingency plans in case your ideal plans do not work out exactly as you had anticipated. Effective planning can be as simple as listing the jobs you have in the shop, their stage in the repair process, and what still needs to be done to complete them. From this master list, you can create a daily work plan to accomplish the goals that the job list dictates. A dry-erasable marker board may be helpful in tracking the jobs in your shop. I use a marker board with each job listed on it, name of the technician to whom it is assigned, what stage it is at in the repair process, and what tasks remain on it before completion. I then have a written docket I use for daily work planning. The marker board is updated at the end of each day so that a new work plan can be written for the next day. The main thing is to find a system that works for your individual situation. It is important to be able to have the information you need at a glance to keep the work in proper order and to be able to make decisions about job planning as easy as possible. Keeping the presentation of information on your job list and daily work plan simple and easy to read will make the task of administering your work plan to technicians easier as well. STEP 5: Using these simple suggestions will allow you to take better control of how work goes into and out of the shop. Better control of that flow means better control over your entire business. It will also mean a greater chance of satisfying your customers and then having their referrals and repeat business, which is most independent shop owners' mainstay. Combining knowledge of what you can do and when, being aware of what might create problems and delays along the way, then scheduling and managing your work in a logical manner will cause you fewer headaches and make your business more successful.
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Copyright (c) 1996-2008. Automotive Service Association. All rights reserved.
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Instead, let's take a different approach. Rather than scheduling work in only on Monday and trying to get the bulk of it (the smaller, more profitable wrecks) out by Friday, schedule them throughout the week. Have a couple come in Monday and schedule them out by Friday, perhaps. Schedule a few more on Tuesday; have them scheduled to go out by Friday or the first part of the following week. Schedule more to arrive Wednesday and schedule them to leave sometime between the first part of the following week to the following Wednesday, and so on. Scheduling work for vehicles arriving Friday is probably of little use, because not much will happen to newly arrived vehicles on Friday in most shops. They will simply turn into Monday jobs instead. You will see in a moment how this will benefit your workflow.
