Shop Productivity Exemplifies Structure

In today’s tough economic climate shop productivity is more crucial than ever.  Good technicians are in short supply and high demand.  Training takes technicians off the floor and sometimes this is a great thing.  For example sending your technicians to manufacturer training in your down months is beneficial as it leaves them on your floor during peak performance months.  Training your technicians can be a daunting task when trying to achieve productivity targets.  Therefore a team structure can be utilized to promote productivity and enhance technician training on the fly.

The technician or shop floor hierarchy, (shown below) shows the levels of technicians and who they report to, I will explain further.  Let’s suppose you have a medium size shop with fourteen technicians, a QC technician and a shop foreman.  Utilizing the talents of key people within your team and structuring your shop to bring these talents to the forefront is of paramount importance to the future viability of your service team.  How do I do this you ask?

Examine your shop floor individual-by-individual looking at their strengths and weaknesses, current productivity and their skill-sets.  Once you have each individual broken down into categories of strongest to weakest you can begin to assemble on paper a structure for each team.  If you already have a shop foreman you are miles ahead of the game, if not you either better hire one or pick one, preferably someone having both exceptional people skills and a strong background in diagnostic repair.

Great, now you have a shop foreman so you can begin assembling your team components.  You will need two team leaders in this exercise who are both strong in diagnostic, have a good ability to lead others and are A class technicians with current up to date training.

Therefore you now have two team leaders, both report to the shop foreman and both are good individual performers as well as having the diagnostic acumen required to train and help organize another technician in the art of diagnostic and repair.  Now analyze the remaining technicians and quantify who would be best suited under which team leader.  In the example below, I have broken it down by B and C technicians however names can be added instead of by their ranking.

The way this works is simply this:

1. The dispatcher or automatic dispatch assigns a job to either a B or C technician for diagnostic concern.   A good example would be a check engine light.  The shop rules for length of time attributed to the diagnostic examination MUST be set by the service manager, shop foreman and the team leaders; this ensures the appropriate amount of time allocated to the diagnostic check, before bringing the team leader into the equation.  For example, I use a thirty minute rule.

2. The thirty minute rule is simply this: A technician can only spend thirty minutes performing a diagnostic.  At the thirty minute mark the technician MUST access if they are making headway to a definitive conclusion, if not then the technician MUST proceed to inform the team leader of the vehicle, the concern, any and all codes and what tests have been performed. 3. The team leader will then punch off his/her job and determine what the next steps in the diagnostic procedure should be.  If the team leader informs the technician what next test to perform to obtain a diagnostic result, then the technician continues on with diagnosing the vehicle.  Once the next steps are completed by the technician he/ she will again communicate with the team leader.  At this point the team leader may know what the problem is with the vehicle and will convey the repair method and or affected parts for replacement to the diagnosing technician.  If however there is no definitive repair as of this time, the team leader can do one of two things.  Either the technician is given further testing to perform or the job is removed from the technician and he/she is assigned to another vehicle. 

The idea of this method is to promote learning and productivity, keeping your technicians productive increases the amount of flow through your shop and promotes a learning atmosphere, by this you reduce your comeback ratio, thus increasing your fixed first visit numbers.  This maneuver increases your CSI and your retention rates.  When customers receive their vehicles back in their possession and they are fixed right, you have far fewer defections to the competition.

4. If the technician has been assigned to another vehicle the team leader will diagnose the problem vehicle further at the next available opportunity.  Once the diagnostic routine is completed and the team leader knows the repair method or what parts require replacing, the original technician will be brought over to the vehicle and he/she will be shown what tests and steps were taken to form a repair procedure. 

5. In the extreme case where even the team leader cannot diagnose the vehicle or determine a proper course of repair, the vehicle will be turned over to the shop foreman for the diagnosis.  Once the shop foreman has effectively diagnosed the vehicle and determined the correct course of repair, both the original technician and the team leader will be brought to the vehicle and the diagnostic procedures explained to them in a clear and concise fashion.  This is a teaching shop at its best, one that brings the level of expertise up and the amount of comebacks down.  This also promotes teamwork, communication and openness on your shop floor. 6. Because the shop foreman has more available time, he/she are allowed to perform their duties and execute the business at hand.  Shop foremen working in this system are more likely to walk the floor and know exactly what vehicles are inside, for how long and know why the vehicle is at your dealership. 

Only you can assess what you feel your team leader’s time is worth when examining a play        plan for them.  I generally pay them a small percentage in real dollars of what the people in their team produce in hours.  For example team A produces 350 hours in a week and the team leader produced 52 of those hours, then you should pay him/her a predetermined amount for the hours produced minus those of the team leader.  Therefore, in this example the team leader would be paid on the production of 298 hours.   An example of a floating team leader production pay scale would look like this;

For this example – 100% productivity for a team of seven people would equal 280 hours per week.

0Hrs to 250Hrs hours = zero per hour
260Hrs – 280Hrs = $00.50 per hour produced
280Hrs – 340Hrs = $00.70 per hour produced
340Hrs – 380Hrs = $00.75 per hour produced
380Hrs – 425Hrs = $00.90 per hour produced
425Hrs and up = $01.00 per hour produced

Remember to back out the team leader’s hours from the pay out.  Example – Team A produces 375 hours and the team leader produced 74 hours, this means the team leader gets paid from the example above $00.75 per hour produced at 301 hours = $225.75

In the new age of electronics and a shortage of talent in the workforce, you may need to seriously look at your on the job training requirements and your productivity initiatives, somewhere the two shall meet.

David