Tips for smarter scheduling that will improve your shop’s efficiency, cycle time

May 16, 2014
To get the best cycle time, balance your shop schedule throughout the week so the same number of cars are brought in and delivered each day.

One of the most common barriers I see to a shop improving its cycle time is bad scheduling. Too many shops schedule everything in on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. So the painter who is standing around early in the week with nothing to do is then scrambling on Thursdays and Fridays to get it all done.

Most shop management systems will track how many cars you take in and how many you deliver each week. Make a chart of it, and for many shops that chart will look like an ‘X’. The line showing the number of cars taken is high on Monday and drops to a low on Friday, and the line showing number of cars delivered starts low on Monday and rises throughout the week to a high on Friday.

 The most efficient way to schedule for the best cycle time, however, is to flatten out that ‘X,’ making both lines flat across the week. That means the same number of cars brought in and delivered each day.

I suggest you determine your anticipated monthly sales and divide that by your average repair order. So for easy math, let’s say you do $200,000 a month in sales, and your average repair order is $2,000. That means you need to average 100 cars a month. If there are 20 working days that month, your goal should be to bring in five jobs a day, put five cars into paint each day, and deliver five cars each day.

Shops sometimes say it’s a challenge to get customers to schedule on a Thursday or Friday because they don’t want to be without their car over the weekend. Here’s a tip I learned from Aaron Marshall at Marshall Auto Body in Waukesha, Wisc. If you schedule the first five customers who call on a Monday, the next five on Tuesday and the next five on Wednesday, then you’re hoping the next 10 will schedule on Thursday or Friday. Those aren’t great odds.

But Aaron suggests instead trying to schedule Thursday and Friday first. You’re then trying to find 10 out of 25 customers to schedule for Thursday or Friday. Those are much better odds.

Another thing I suggest is posting a sign on the front counter that said, “Ask us about our Thursday and Friday drop-off specials.” That can help you identify customers who don’t mind bringing their car in later in the week. You can offer them a coffee shop gift card, or a discounted oil change or detailing services.

Shop management systems can also help you dial in your scheduling even further by looking at different categories of jobs. The systems can divide jobs into four or five categories based on the number of labor hours per job. A job with two or fewer labor hours might be a “category 1,” while a job with 2-8 labor hours might be a “category 2,” etc.

Look at this data over a year, and you can see how many of each category you do in a typical month. Again, you can then use that information to schedule more effectively. If you typically do 40 “category 3” jobs in a month, you know you should schedule two of them in per day in a 20-workday month.

Whatever systems you try, I will tell you that everyone I’ve challenged to do this has come back to me and said, “Scheduling drop-offs on Thursday and Friday isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.” They find their staff’s stress level drops along with their cycle time.

But what about insurer push-back? First, my message to those insurers is: Get over it. Let us fix the cars and produce for you. Give us the flexibility to schedule efficiently, and your cycle time will improve.

I also know shops who have convinced insurer supervisors to let the shop try scheduling more efficiently for a few months; the results have shown the insurers it works. Remember: “No” doesn’t mean no. “No” means they don’t yet have enough information to say “yes.”

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