Take advantage of existing management tools

Jan. 1, 2020
Too often during the process of getting to understand a business I find that the shop owner is using less than 20 percent of the tools and information that the shop's management system can provide.
Mike Anderson

One of the first things I do when a shop owner hires me to do some onsite consulting is to do some fact-finding.

I interview employees, for example, to find out what it is they like and don't like at the business, and what they feel the challenges are.

Too often during the process of getting to understand a business I find that the shop owner is using less than 20 percent of the tools and information that the shop's management system can provide to help improve the business.

An owner will be concerned about his shop's lack of sales, for example. Yet he isn't using his management system to track and compare the closing ratios of his estimators. How can he determine if the problem is not enough traffic to the door, or if it's just that his estimators aren't capturing as many of those potential customers as they should?

Another shop owner may be concerned about inefficiencies within the business, but isn't tracking, for example, how many parts orders there are per job, or how many parts are being returned per vendor or per repair order – and the reasons for those returns.

Or a shop owner will be unsure which aspects of the company's marketing are effective, but is tracking the sources of the shop's work using only vague categories like "Internet" or "agent."

I'm a big believer in the theory that if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. By putting the specific measurement information you need into your management system, you can then produce and analyze reports regularly to manage and improve your business.

Get down to specifics

Notice that I said "specific" information. If you're tracking why parts are returned, for example, don't just enter "wrong part." You need to know why each part was wrong: Was it ordered wrong? Was it the wrong side or color? Did the supplier not send what was ordered?

Refine your customer source categories so you can track whether those "Internet" customers, for example, found you via your shop website, a customer review site like Yelp, or a paint company or insurer shop-locator site.

A good management system can help you track why a vehicle delivery date was changed by prompting you to enter a reason for the change. Again, be specific.

Don't just indicate a vehicle had to be repainted. That's too basic. Was this necessary because of color match, or because the body tech scratched a panel during reassembly?

A management system also can help you be proactive rather than reactive. It can help you keep customers informed by automatically sending them an e-mail or text as you change within the system where their vehicle is in the process. And it can allow you to check which parts have been ordered but not received.

Do this for every vehicle expected to be delivered three or four days from now, and you can avoid those last-minute delays because a part isn't discovered as missing until a day or two before it is scheduled to leave.

A good management system can help you schedule work productively by "load-leveling" based on the number and productivity of your technicians and the size of the job.

A good management system also will save you time. If you enter a parts price change in some of the systems, for example, they will make that change back to the estimate, saving you a step.

As you start to pull more data from yTake advantage of existing management toolsour management system, I recommend keeping in mind something that a gentleman in the AutoNation organization told me. He said that within his company, data tells them one of two things: Either you should celebrate, or you should "go look."

When you run any report from your management system, consider if it is telling you that you're doing well and you should celebrate, or if it is telling you that you should "go look" to see why the numbers aren't what they should be.

Mike Anderson, a former shop owner, currently operates COLLISIONADVICE.COM, a training and consulting firm. He also acts as a facilitator for DuPont Performance Services' Business Council 20-groups.

If you have a business issue or question you'd like Mike to address, email him. [email protected]

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