Putting a ruler to the paint shop

Shops have traditionally measured the performance of their paint department in one way: technician efficiency, says Joe Skurka.

"It's the actual clock hours spent on the job versus the billed hours on the job," said Skurka, manager of OEM and industry relations for BASF Automotive Refinish. "The way this business is set up in terms of rates and hours, it's a key number. It has to be 150 to 200 percent, and some painters will get it higher." 

But Skurka is also well aware of the potential shortcomings of technician efficiency as a paint shop measurement. There's the fact, for example, that half of the equation is driven not by the painter but by the estimator or blueprinter on the job.

"If the sheet is written wrong, if you forget to include the blend or the underside of the panel, for example, you're in trouble," Skurka said. "So if a painter's efficiency doesn't seem to be what it should be, you have to investigate just that: Are the estimates correct?"

A shop with multiple painters has the luxury of being able to compare their efficiencies as one way to eliminate the variable related to estimate accuracy, Skurka said.

But what other ways can shop owners and managers gauge how well their paint shop is performing? Here's what Skurka and other paint manufacturer representatives – along with some shop owners themselves – say are some effective tools and gauges.

Measure jobs, not hours

Steve Feltovich concurs that technician efficiency is problematic as a primary way to measure a shop's paint department.

"So you flag a bunch of hours, but were they the right hours," asks Feltovich, manager of business consulting for Sherwin-Williams Automotive Finishes. "It doesn't measure the fundamental reality you need, which is: How many cars did you deliver to customers? Technician efficiency can be a good internal measurement, but it's not of much external value. Turning a bunch of hours may make us feel good but it doesn't create value to the customer standing at the curb waiting to pick up his or her car."

Feltovich said that since completed cars is what customers want and will pay for, shops should instead focus on how many jobs they move successfully through the booth each day.

"I consider optimization of the spray booth and paint shop as an average of seven units per booth per day, looking at it over a month-long period," Feltovich said. "If you fall below that, you really should start assessing what you should be doing differently."

Part of what may be preventing your paint department from producing that seven jobs per booth per day are the paint defects they are having to correct, something else Feltovich recommends tracking in order to drill down to find and correct the causes.

"It's incredible how much wasted time and material is generated in reworking refinishing defects," he said. "If we would strip that out of our working day, how many more units could we produce that we're not producing today?"

Measuring mistakes

Like Feltovich, Bryan Robinson thinks too many shop owners think they know how many re-do's of paint work they are doing, but aren't set up to track it in a consistent way.

"Adopt an internal program that's formalized and executed to measure the percentage of cars you're redoing," said Robinson, North American manager of national accounts for PPG Automotive Refinish.

A redo isn't just the vehicle that a customer doesn't accept because of a paint issue, Robinson said. It's also the "internal" redo, the vehicle that returns to the paint department from the detailing or denib-and-buff area, or worse yet from the body department after it has been reassembled.

In addition to measuring redo's as a way to reduce them, Robinson said there are several other paint shop measurements he sees a growing number of progressive shops using to improve their business.

The first, he said, is "costs per refinish hour sold." Robinson said there isn't really a benchmark shops should be aiming for with this measurement because there's some accounting variation in what costs shops include in the equation.

"But this is one thing I foresee more shops watching in the next five years," he said. "They're establishing a benchmark for themselves, and then looking for a trend of improvement."

A second new measure Robinson has seen in use is "gallons of clear per refinish hours sold."

"For each gallon of clear, track how many refinish hours were sold," he said. "Again, there's no benchmark here, it's more a matter of trying to improve it internally. But if you're tracking it and you see the number of hours per gallon is declining, that could signal over-pouring or theft or any number of reasons that you're usage is up."

Tracking costs per panel

Mike Young, owner of Atomic Auto Body in Richland, Wash., acknowledges that he's a numbers junkie. Those who know Young through his long-time participation in 20 groups say that few shop owners track and know their numbers as well as he does.

Having used Akzo Nobel paints since the mid-1980s, Young stuck with Akzo's Autowave when he converted the shop to waterborne basecoats about two years ago. He said that while he tracks the shop's efficiencies by car and by department, there are two key things he now tracks in his paint shop: materials use by week, and number of panels painted per day and per week.

"The paint manufacturers may say you should be spending a certain dollar amount on materials per car as an average," Young said. "Well, I don't think that's a good enough measure. Some weeks, your jobs will average three panels per car, and other weeks they will average five panels. So we break it down to how much it costs us per panel to shoot a car. I think that gives you a more even common denominator."

Young admits that using a unique measurement method gives him little in the way of a benchmark from the paint manufacturers or other shops with which to compare his shop's performance. But he sees value in working to see that his shop's cost per panel remains consistent or improves.

"We've had a lot of measurements over the years, but those are the two we seem to look at right now," Young said.

Avoid buffing and overmixing

Steve Trapp, collision services development manager for DuPont Performance Coatings, concurred with others that shops should be putting an average of 6.5 to 7.3 jobs per shift through the paint booth. That benchmark has risen in the past year or two, he said, for a number of reasons.

"With our latest waterborne technology, for example, we no longer have to wait for tack time between coats," Trapp said. "Now you can go wet-on-wet through the whole system."

Trapp said waterborne has also led shops to improve the balance and flow of air in their booths, and that, combined with painting more parts off the vehicle, allows shops to paint multiple jobs, even in disparate colors, in the booth at the same time.

He also recommends that shops measure what percentage of jobs require buffing.

"Every time you buff, you essentially have an error, because that's a complete waste of time," Trapp said. "No one is paying you for it. It's a waste that too many shops tolerate."

Trapp said some shops have reduced the need for buffing to 15 percent or less of jobs through the paint booth. One key can be good lighting outside the booth to ensure all prep and staging work is completed before the vehicle enters the booth. Too often, he said, scuffing happens in the booth because that's where shiny surfaces show up in the good lighting. That only leads to dust and dirt in the booth – and in the paint job.

Trapp also recommends that shops use the tools the paint companies offer to avoid over-mixing, another good measurement of paint shop performance.

"We have been able to help shops cut the amount of overmix from 15 percent on the average – and up to 23 percent on the high side – down to 6 or 7 percent, with some shops under 3 percent," Trapp said.

On the sales side, Trapp recommends shops aim for paint materials to account for 10.5 to 10.8 percent of sales, and for refinish sales to be 19.6 to 20.1 percent of total sales.

But Trapp also said as helpful as all these measurements can be, he also cautions against losing sight of what he sees as the key element of a successful paint shop: flow.

"The most successful shops recognize that flow wins out over all the other metrics," Trapp said. "The more you emphasize some of these micromanagement matrix, the further you can get from flow and the further you get from getting cars out the door. So at the end of the day, what we want the paint shop to do is never be the bottleneck or barrier to flow. So you never want to put in a procedure or process that hurts that."