Making Your Work in Process Work

There’s a feeling store owners sometimes have: “Is my store performing well enough?” Some days they look at the store and see the capacity to do more work, and some days they cannot handle the current workload. Helping turn emotions into results is where David McCreight comes in.

“People say, ‘I always thought I could do more because I knew the benchmarks or the things that would tell me the things I could do,'” says McCreight, owner and president of planning provider Collision Resources Inc. and estimating software and consulting services. I could never figure out how to do it; we tried more employees, we tried different payment plans.’ “And that goes back to how you load the store, the mix of work you load into the store, and then managing the work that goes on throughout the flow.”

McCreight tried to solve this problem through software, and it produced positive results for many customers. In the process, he identified numerous pitfalls that stores face when it comes to scheduling work, operating efficiently and increasing revenue.

Back Story

Anyone who has worked in collision repair for a while knows the standard operating procedure when it comes to scheduling: Pick up on Monday, ship on Friday. 25 years ago, computers were used in stores for no other purpose than making predictions, but planning was done using desk calendars. He was filling in the blank spaces on a page.

Stores were scheduling employees based on the number of jobs but did not take into account the number of hours actually spent on a job. This was before many large consolidators and MSOs entered the market and pooled their resources to gain insight from data in many locations. So, while it might make sense to stock the store on Monday and finish the entire job in one work week, reality has shown this to be an inefficient process. McCreight, then a business development manager at AkzoNobel, began to notice where stores were failing to plan.

“These were actually negatively impacting the number of vehicles connecting over the weekend,” says McCreight. “Because when we synchronized the schedule, we saw that the number of cars connected on the weekend decreased by a third. Because the cars were arriving on Monday, but they were waiting until Wednesday or Thursday without touching them.”

Problem

As McCreight observed, stores scheduled jobs in theory rather than reality. They were at capacity, but that didn’t mean the work was done. The timing wasn’t actually in line with the way the job was assigned.

“A lot of the time, body technicians would just go to the lot and pick the cars they wanted to work on,” McCreight recalls. “So they were looking for sauce, or maybe they were looking for a really big job where they could have a good time. So he didn’t have to focus on what was good for the customer. That was a good thing for the technician. “There was no process for assigning work there.”

Although times have changed and modern stores have access to all kinds of resources, including software solutions like McCreight’s, to solve scheduling and workflow inefficiencies, many stores are still setting themselves up for failure. McCreight identifies several areas where shops can improve their workflows, such as planning the right mix of jobs, moving to the visual production process, and identifying bottlenecks in the store.

A store’s work in progress (WIP), as the name suggests, is a measure of the amount of work in hours a store is currently occupied with. Sometimes there are delays in the shop experience for a myriad of reasons, and when technicians have to do something, the shop’s impulse is to add more work. But too much work quickly piles up, piling up and craters in cycle time.

Solution

McCreight released the first version of its software in 2002, which included a patented algorithm that continued to improve over time. McCreight is a Lean Six Sigma black belt and certified business coach and is knowledgeable in his approach to these solutions. However, making process improvements does not require a detailed job audit. The path to greater efficiency is finding the sweet spot of your WIP, where productivity is maximized and not overtaxed.

As an example, McCreight says, “You don’t want to have just one car on the site, because if you have one car, what are other people going to be working on? I mean, one car is not the right number, and if you’re doing 50 cars a month, if there’s 100 cars on the site at any given time, there’s a lot of work on the site.” So somewhere between 1 and 100, you’ll cross two lines (like on the chart) and you’ll be somewhere in that target range.”

McCreight’s software can help perform such calculations automatically. But initially he was doing this manually with an Excel spreadsheet and value stream map. This revealed that it was important to get the appropriate job mix; Not all jobs are created equal, and shops need less serious repairs to fill gaps and operate at peak efficiency.

Planning software can also give a visual impression of the repair process that is easy for everyone to see. Let’s assume there are more cars waiting than there are technicians ready to work.

“There’s an imbalance there, which once again determines where the waste is in the system,” McCreight says. “Then it becomes visual. Everyone can see this because it’s something shared with the entire team. “They put it on big screen TVs and that makes it visual.”

Takeaway

McCreight’s system produced some impressive results. In addition to reducing the percentage of cars held over the weekend by 33%, it also claims that hours produced on repair orders have increased by 31% and cycle time has been reduced by two full days.

“You show customers the numbers, you show them what’s in their store,” McCreight says. “You show them what they’re doing before and after they use the program, and they can always produce more hours, more tools, but the stress level goes down. “They produce more work with the same number of people and the same square meter.”

Many times the key to success is actually reducing the number of cars a store buys in a day. The reason is simple; The cost of buying an extra car can cause a chain reaction that favors cycle time. Questioning where bottlenecks occur in a store is important to finding that sweet spot.

“If you can, when you reduce the number of vehicles on site by one and maintain the same production capacity, you improve your cycle time,” says McCreight.

Post

Identifying where these bottlenecks are often means changing processes. This may mean moving to a new software system, and these changes are never easy. Therefore, in addition to speeding up the repair process, it is also important to be a good change manager. Store owners should take care to find out the best way for their employees to engage with new information and what is the best way for them to learn.

“Changing management, getting your team involved, can’t be where you go to a group of 20 people, bring an idea, work on it for two weeks, and it just disappears,” says McCreight. “Your employees get used to it, and change management becomes really difficult because they always go back to what they were doing.”