One of the changes we’ve made that has helped boost our productivity will sound counter-intuitive: We actually converted four workable stalls in one of our shops into a new parts area.
Some of you will likely stop reading right there, thinking that’s the craziest idea you’ve ever heard. If anything, you may be thinking that you need more stalls for vehicles, not fewer.
But I can assure you that it’s a change that has worked out well for us.
Like many in the industry, for years we had treated parts as a bit of a “red-headed stepchild,” not focusing near enough thought and attention on that “department.” But what I’ve come to realize is, given how important parts are to our business, we should be dedicating the necessary space to deal with the parts effectively.
I will admit that even as I was converting those four premium working stalls just outside our parts managers office into a parts area, I was thinking: There’s just no way this is going to work. A stall needs a car in it.
But when I thought about it, I saw that we had more vehicles in stalls in the building that we were working on because many of them were just waiting: waiting for a supplement, waiting for paperwork, waiting for parts. The problem is not the technician. The problem is how we’re administratively dealing with the parts and the paperwork. If you give a technician a workable car, a job that doesn’t requiring starting and stopping but can just be worked on until it’s finished, that car can be in and out of that stall very, very quickly.
So we instituted a very deliberate, consistent parts system to ensure parts are never the reason a car is just waiting in a stall. For example, our system includes carts and bins. The carts in the four converted stalls hold damaged parts that will be replaced; the bins on the adjacent walls hold parts that have been removed but will be reinstalled.
The system includes a lot of what I call “safety nets,” which prevent the common parts problems that can bring work on a vehicle to a halt. Humans are always going to make errors, especially in a high-variable business like ours. So we create safety nets.
For instance, when our parts personnel are checking in parts, they can “mirror-match” them against the damaged parts on the carts that they are replacing. If the new part is correct, the old part is thrown away. If only nine parts arrive but there are 10 parts on the cart, the fact that there’s still a part missing immediately stands out like a sore thumb.
Now granted, maybe that’s more of an issue given our location in Alaska. We can’t just call and expect that missing part to show up later in the day. It may be several days away by boat. So this makes a huge difference for us, and probably for anyone without parts warehouses nearby. But a vehicle sitting delayed in a stall even for a few hours is still a vehicle just waiting. So even shops I know using this same system in Long Island, N.Y. and Phoenix, Ariz., say there’s a benefit to doing it.
We also back-tracked a bit from our “paperless” system. We realized that color-coded folders for our parts system often can provide information more quickly in a visual way than always necessitating a look at the computer.
So does a body technician really need three stalls with a vehicle in each? No way. He just needs one stall with a great, workable car in it. He has only needed three stalls in the past because he’s waiting for something on the vehicles in two of them.
Eliminate those delays, and you will likely find, as we have, that you can dedicate more space for a better, more productive parts system, which in turn can improve your shop’s performance.
