Running a Body Shop can be tough, it may seem like you have not enough hours in the day to get your jobs done. Avoid these basic mistakes and you’ll be more efficient and profitable and less stressed says workshop planning system Planning Plus.
1 Overloading the parking area
This is something we are all guilty of, a customer comes in, they need their bumper painted, you are really busy but you know you’ll have time later in the week to get it done. “Yeah, sure, give me the keys I’ll have it for a day or two and ring you when it’s finished.” One week later you see that car lying idle in the car park as if it has just arrived. Schedule the car in and stick to the time frame.
2 Staffing
Our staff are our bread and butter, reliable and skilled staff are as valuable as the best equipment you can buy. A major issue than can impact planning is not actually having enough qualified technicians to deal with the workload and job cycle demands. If so, you will never meet your deadlines. Managing your employees and working to their skills base is key for good productivity. You cannot pull technicians from one job to the other, allow them to finish one job before they move to the next. Also, have a look at the vehicle’s cycle through the shop. Do you know what your productive hours per day per vehicle KPI is?
3 Bookings and Parts
You have to ensure that your parts are available before you book the vehicle in. There is no point in having a car booked in and no parts to enable continuous flow – that is just wasting valuable time.
4 Schedule Times
There are two main issues here. Firstly gut feel scheduling times can lead to much longer cycle times. Planning Plus software helps with planning work cycle times for your technicians and gives everyone a visual representation of your workflow. Not sticking to planned and scheduled times will really mess up your workflow. If a car is scheduled in for a one day cycle and it ends up being three that lowers your productive hours per vehicle per day KPI and puts you behind with all your other jobs.
5 Loan Vehicles
Some repairers still provide loan cars, so why have loan vehicles if you are not going to use them? Check if you have any loan vehicles idle over the weekend, if you do, loan them out! You could get a customer’s car in on a Thursday or Friday and have it finished and in the paint shop for Monday morning instead of painters waiting for the panel shop to filter jobs through sometime Monday afternoon.
Planning Plus Software
Use workflow scheduling and management software, which is visual, secure and intuitive. Stop wasting time with a white board and install a simple yet highly effective planning system which will immediately improve workflow, generate more jobs per week and increase gross profit. Planning Plus has been designed to work seamlessly on its own or when importing information from other software products such as IBodyshop, Auto-Quote, Flexiquote, Car Quote, VQS, Quotimation, etc. Some of the features that Planning Plus offers include:
- Highly visual touch capable workflow planning
- Automated task breakdowns that convert the labour dollars authorised to target hours per task for the employee
- Labour budget calculator that calculates the number of hours each employee needs to produce each day
- Labour budget vs actual labour produced for each employee
- Employee performance reports
- Track My Car 1 click checking for customers
- eForms for Quality Assurance.