For most techs, the morning starts off with a cup of coffee and a few minutes of pondering, "Which job should I do first to get it out of the way?" or "What's gonna be the easiest job for me to do today?" There are always the "good" jobs and then there are the "loser" jobs. Some techs save the "loser" jobs for last and get the "good" (more profitable) jobs out first. From my experience, most of the better techs get a head of steam and tackle the "headache job from yesterday" first thing in the morning so the rest of the day goes more smoothly. Whichever order you choose, the fact remains - the "loser" jobs are going to have to get done just the same. It's all about Production Momentum.

Keep your momentum up and the billed hours seem to fall out of the sky by the dozen. Lose your momentum and those very same hours seem to ascend "back up to the heavens." If you keep your production momentum in high gear all week, it usually shows on the paycheck stub in the form of 50 to 60 billed hours. Whether you are paid by the billed hour or on a fixed salary, the shop still has a bottom line, and your Production Momentum is one of the most important contributors (or detriments) to it.

However, keeping your momentum rolling can be hard to do. It's definitely an all uphill battle. There are far more things trying to kill your momentum than increase it. All the parts have to arrive on time. All the customer approvals for repairs have to be quick. A lift has to be open. And these are just some of the possibilities. On occasion, you may have an unusually long wait for a part, or for a customer approval, or for a lift. By and large, these things are usually far and few between and, for the most part, out of the technician's control. In practical terms on a day-to-day basis, they could almost be considered constants. Production Momentum's worst enemy is undoubtedly electrical and driveability diagnostics. Figuring out why a "Check Engine" light is on can take 10 minutes or 10 hours. Making matters worse, it usually takes more time to get customer approvals on diagnostics. Still worse, the number of times in an average week that technicians have to face an electrical or driveability diagnosis is growing more and more with each passing year. In yet another aspect of this real-life scenario, in some shops the "smartest" tech gets a disproportionate share of the "diagnostic" jobs. In this case, it can be counter-productive to be the smartest technician. However, for the most part, how long a diagnosis takes is within the technician's control.

It's not only an uphill battle, but the hill is undoubtedly getting steeper and will continue to do so as the current vehicle manufacturing and marketing trends dictate. Shop owners beware: shop profit momentum is in increasing danger!

Who's to blame?
The vehicle manufacturers are partly to blame. They might have created their own dealerships' worst nightmare. Vehicle quality is up. Vehicle maintenance intervals are being extended (for example, 100,000 mile tune-ups). This on-going trend serves to distance the link between the consumer and the dealership (or independent repair facility), and consequently the repair facility's profits.

The specialty franchises are partly to blame. Jiffy Lube, Midas and a host of others that only do the easy-to-perform (and more profitable) scheduled maintenance work, are becoming increasingly competitive and abundant. They can affect the independent do-it-all service facility's bottom line by eroding local market price and by stealing some of the "good" jobs.

The health of the environment and/or the EPA is partly to blame. It's only going to get worse. To meet new EPA mandates and design requirements, electronic content in vehicles increases with every new model introduced. The vehicles are having less failures, but when they do, they are requiring more expertise and high-powered equipment to fix them due to their increased complexity. So how do we keep our Production Momentum up?

Defy the odds
There are three major components to increasing and maintaining Production Momentum. All three are related and inter-woven. Without any one of them, the "firewall" that protects your Production Momentum is severely weakened. The components are:

• Be a sponge for driveability and electronics training.
• Have your shop or your toolbox fully equipped with the necessary scan tools, lab scopes, pressure gauges and other diagnostic equipment.
• Create and enforce a diagnostic plan for your shop.

We've all heard about the first two. No surprise there. The third component, however, may contain several surprises. Since our shop designed, printed and instituted a diagnostic plan last year, our production momentum and diagnostic profit has increased substantially. Dave Denman gets partial thanks for that because of an article he wrote on diagnostic profit in the Spring of 1996.

First, we tell our customer (and show them using our color flow chart) what we are going to do to diagnose their problem. Our flow chart has several menus of diagnostic services embedded in it. Along the path to a successful diagnosis are milestones and stopping points, along with their associated costs. But one of the most important components of our Diagnostic Plan is how we justify our diagnostic time to our customers. Justification is the key! How willing would you be to pay for a $200 set of X-rays you never got to see? Probably not too willing. The answer lies in a concept called "data acquisition." The X-ray machine "acquired" the data (took the X-ray picture) and then the X-ray transparency was "developed." If we translate this to an automotive service situation, the diagnostic tool would be the X-ray machine and a personal computer and printer would be the "developer."

Put technology to work
You have to exercise a little technology here. You have to have a computer, diagnostic tools with communications capability, and a special computer software program that, in the best case, works with all of your diagnostic equipment. The proof is in the pudding, however. Our experience indicates it was well worth the investment for us. What we've found is that our customers are much more willing to pay for diagnostic time if they can see and touch the results of it in living color printed on a piece of paper. Seeing really is believing, not to mention that service advisors love it because "a picture is worth a thousand words." They expend much less energy to sell the diagnostic services.

We create "Diagnostic Service Reports" for our customers. The Diagnostic Service Report usually consists of a waveform or waveforms annotated with pointed balloon notes we added that highlight the problem, the vehicle information and the cost of the repairs. Instead of waveforms, we may substitute a scan tool output of trouble codes or serial data, or even a 5-gas output - whatever is best for the circumstance at hand. But whether it be a waveform, scan tool output or gas analyzer output, the result is almost always the same. We can charge what our time is worth while we use less energy at the front counter to get paid for it. In addition, we sometimes fax or use the Internet to share our diagnostic information with our hotline service or other technicians to get a second opinion on a diagnosis, just like doctors do in the medical field.

The writing is on the wall. We must all increase our diagnostic defenses. The way to ensure Production Momentum today and even more-so in the future is to increase the strength of your diagnostic arsenal, or it may spell doom for your full service business. Vehicles are having less failures and competition for their scheduled services is becoming fierce. That means, from a marketing standpoint and technical standpoint, you may want to concentrate on several things:

• Create a diagnostic plan for your shop and be able to print diagnostic results.
• Train continuously using any and all methods (classroom, self-study, Internet). Educate employees who sell the diagnostic service on how the plan works and how it can help.
• Buy diagnostic equipment that is compatible with your system that creates diagnostic service reports (make sure your diagnostic tool can communicate with your computer and your software).

The game is still the same
Production Momentum is becoming increasingly harder to maintain. But the game is still the same for facilities providing full service. If we work really hard (and smart) at being better than our competition, we'll get the lion's share of the available work. That's always been the case, but the need to do this quickly may be underestimated by many. The market is changing fast and building a streamlined diagnostic arsenal can take several months or even years. The good news is that the quicker it's built and perfected, the quicker the profits will increase for the shop owner and the technician.

Pete Sullivan is co-owner of Sullivan's Advanced Auto Care in Houston, Texas, with his brother Dan. He is a triple ASE Master Tech with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and phy-sics. He's written several books on automotive diagnostics and is a member of SAE and STS.

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