Start everyday with a plan of preparedness! Each of your employees also needs to come to work with a plan of how the day will flow, what will they do, do they have vehicles left over from yesterday or the day before, to succeed and survive in the automotive repair industry everyone at your facility needs to have a daily plan. What are your expectations of your employee’s daily plan and do they clearly understand them?
Ensure your employees know you will be coming around to see each of them in the morning asking for their reports and route sheets. Make sure the shop foreman and dispatcher know you will be asking for shop loading numbers, vehicle comeback sheet, left over vehicles from the prior day, shop capacity, technician absenteeism and any other pertinent issues that will define the day.
Have a strategy meeting each morning with your BDC department. You only need a five minute session with your BDC and appointment booker to verify that you are booked for the day, if not figure out quickly how to get the extra appointments in TODAY. Check on the declined service follow up calls, how many declined service customers need to be called from the prior day?
Verify that your parts manager has given your BDC the SOP parts list for any parts that arrived that morning, than have your BDC verify the SOP parts appointments and in the instance that parts were ordered without an appointment MAKE SURE the BDC is booking ASAP. Having SOP parts sit on the shelf ties up money, shelf space and we all know that in the end parts obsolescence returns are not something the owner or the parts manager want to contend with no matter what the reason.
Normally, the service manager should be in the service drive first thing in the morning, observing and critiquing the advisors on proper vehicle walk around inspections as well as meeting and greeting customers. Once the rush is over then the service manager can attend to reports such as the advisor daily report or technician numbers from the day prior.
I was once asked by a senior manager why I wasn’t in my office at 8:00 AM doing my reports from the previous day, my reply was quite simply, “I cannot change what happened yesterday however my being in the service drive coaching, training and impacting what happens on the drive has a positive effect on today’s numbers”! My advice is to impact today because you can change today’s outcome, you cannot change what happened yesterday. It’s that simple!
Meet with your warranty administrator once a day to find out the status of all claims. Make sure your submission dates are within a two day window and verify the warranty schedule is up to date each and every day. Look at your warranty indexes and make sure you fall within the manufacturers guidelines on regular warranty, extended warranty and maintenance if your manufacturer provides free maintenance.
Check with your warranty administrator each day for the Fixed First Visit Ratio of your total shop as well as each individual technician. This is a report that he or she should be able to run daily. FFV or Fixed First Visit Ratio gives you a very strong indication of training or experience levels on your shop floor. This is something to monitor with the shop foreman as well!
Ensure your loaner car or fleet manager has a report for you each day on loaners in service, how many days the vehicles have been out and print out a loaner fleet utilization report. Monitor the report and get onto the advisors who have completed, ready vehicles that are not picked up, picked up by the customer and have the loaners cleaned and fuelled ASAP. Loaner vehicles are your ability to book more appointments each day. The quicker the turn-around time with your loaner vehicles means more profits for the store!
In short each dealership is inherently different and therefore the daily plan will be different for each facility, my intent is to show that in fact you do need a daily action plan or you may stagnate instead of succeeding. When you begin each day with a clear concise set of goals and a proper plan, you and your employees will ultimately become more productive.
“Prior Planning Prevents Poor performance”
David
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