Cara Lea Lewis and Mark Debono of East Coast Paint and Panel (ECPP) were busy last week with Melanie Spink from their paint company Valspar. Spink is Business Services Manager for Valspar’s Quality First program.
There is so much help available to autobody repair businesses if you just ask for it. Spink spent two days at ECPP helping in a number of ways.
SOPs & KPIs
While ECPP is small, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and setting key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential to any business. Standard operating procedures need to be in place for any repetitive task in the workshop or office, from how you greet customers, to how the workshop should be left at the end of the day. Putting these in place allows all staff to know what’s expected of them and the KPIs can measure their success.
Cara said: “Melanie explained everything in terms I could totally understand, it helps of course that she has experience of running a bodyshop as well as her Valspar experience and training.
She has given us a great resource of templates for each of the processes. We have to prioritise what’s important to us and aim to implement two per week.
“With each one we will produce a large visual sheet to put up on the wall if it’s a workshop process.”
Booking organisation
Spink also showed ECPP how to be more organised in taking bookings to ensure a steady workflow instead of just saying yes to everything and then having to work around the clock to get it finished. Meanwhile Debono has been having training on iBodyshop on quoting which has already opened his eyes in a number of ways. Between the iBodyshop quoting and working with Spink they are now realising that they haven’t been breaking down their costs enough – just logging labour, materials and parts. Now they have spreadsheets in place to compare their costs from paint and panel to see if these are balanced. When they install iBodyshop they will also have access to the workshop planning part of the program which will make the booking in process flow smoothly.
Spink has also got ECPP to analyse where their customers are coming from, as the first step to deciding how they want to grow the business.
Overall business picture
“This all dovetails with the work we are doing with our business coach Ben Fewtrell. We have realised how important implementing these processes are for our efficiency and how breaking down all our costs down will benefit our profits.”