Smarter scheduling can smooth out production, cut cycle time, improve on-time delivery
By John Yoswick
Scheduling customers isn’t quite the challenge for collision repairers as it was pre-pandemic. A national survey in July found shops had an average backlog of work of about eight days, slightly more than half the national average in January.
“We were six weeks out before this hit,” the owner of an Ohio shop said, reporting that his shop was scheduling any new jobs in July within one-and-a-half weeks.
Still, this summer’s survey showed work had picked up from April when the same survey found the average backlog had fallen to less than five days. So shops are once again finding more of a need to schedule efficiently to ensure productivity and customer satisfaction.
Here is some advice for improving scheduling at your shop.
Scheduling basics
A common cause of poor scheduling is overestimating your shop’s production capabilities. Knowing how many labor hours your individual technicians — and the shop as a whole — produces per day or week is the key to any effective scheduling system.
As with any measurement, the more data you have about how many labor hours your technicians and shop produce, the more accurate your calculations will be. But even a month’s worth of data can provide a good starting point.
Here’s how to begin. At the end of each week, calculate how many labor hours each technician produced. For each technician, divide that number by the number of actual clock hours he or she worked. The result is that technician’s proficiency. A technician, for example, that completes 74 flat rate hours in an 40-hour work week has a 185 percent proficiency rate.
Add up the total number of hours produced in the week, and divide by the total number of clock hours technicians worked, to get your shop’s proficiency rate. Let’s say you have three technicians, and each worked 40 hours last week. One completed 74 flat rate labor hours, one completed 78, and the third completed 76. Combined, they produced 228 labor hours in 120 clock hours for an overall proficiency of 190 percent.
Chart this information for four weeks to find an average. Let’s say over four weeks your shop produces an average of 250 hours. Ideally, that’s the number of labor hours you want to schedule in each week — or about 50 hours each weekday — moving forward. Obviously, the chances of hitting either the daily or weekly scheduling target on the nose isn’t critical. But if you see that you’ve gone over for one day, you can schedule a little lighter for the next day.
Some shops also vary the percentage of the weekly total that they schedule in each day; rather than bringing 20 percent of the week’s total in each day, they schedule in 25 percent of the week’s total on both Monday and Tuesday, 20 percent of the total on Wednesday and 15 percent of the total on both Thursday and Friday. Adjust the percentages any way you want, but keep reading for more information on why not bringing enough of the work in on Thursday and Friday is going to result in your facility and staff not being as productive as it can be.
But also remember that pre-scheduled jobs don’t account for every vehicle in your shop. The other number you need from your shop’s historical data is how many jobs on average each month were unexpected tow-ins or drop-offs. This will vary a bit, week-by-week, but to not allow at least some space on the schedule for those, when you have some historical information about how many to expect, would be foolish. If you’ve typically seen an average of eight such jobs a month in the past, put at least two or three a week on your calendar, and schedule other vehicles in around those. If those tow-ins show up, they won’t create chaos and missed deadlines. If they don’t show up, you can always call a customer scheduled for later to see if they want to bring their car in early.
Bad scheduling habits
The common practice of scheduling many cars in on Monday in order to deliver most cars by Friday can create a mad-house experience customers and employees on those two days. But the chaotic feel of the shop on those days isn’t the only good argument against the “in on Monday, out on Friday” scheduling method. There’s the potential of customers driving by and seeing their car unmoved from the spot in your lot where they dropped it off a day or two previously. It can unnecessarily add to rental vehicle costs (for you, your customer or an insurance company). And at least one study — as well as anecdotal evidence from shops around the country — indicates that scheduling vehicles more evenly throughout the week can improve a shop’s productivity and reduce cycle time — without spiking rental car costs.
It’s easy to understand why so many shops have fallen into the habit of scheduling the bulk of vehicles into the shop early in the week. Neither insurers nor customers are wild about the idea of vehicles sitting idle over a weekend while the shop is closed. And having a week’s supply of vehicles on-site ensures there’s always another one to work on if something forces a halt to repairs on another.
But that process also can create logjam after logjam in the shop as that glut of work moves through the shop’s departments at the same time.
Some years ago as the consulting firm Collision Resources was developing scheduling software for shops, it conducted a scheduling study of three collision repair businesses. The study looked at the three shops (with at that time annual sales of $1 million, $2 million and $4 million, respectively) for a 10-month period — five months before and five months after switching away from “in on Monday, out on Friday” scheduling.
The study found almost a two-day drop in cycle time and a 30 percent improvement in the hours produced per repair order per day. The reason for the improved performance is pretty apparent if you look at most shop’s parking lots on Mondays and Tuesdays; there’s often more vehicles on-site than can immediately move into production, so many of those vehicles sit idle for one or more days before much if any work begins. At the other end of the week, the painting, reassembly and detailing processes all get bogged down as the shop scrambles to get everything out on Friday.
A better alternative, the study suggested, is to bring in essentially an equal amount of work each day, so that an equal amount of work is delivered each day. Rental car costs overall don’t rise because the fact that some cars may be in the shop over the weekend is offset by the two-day overall reduction in cycle time.
Collision Resources said this can be demonstrated by comparing labor hours produced to “weekend days.” (One car sitting idle over a two-day weekend equals two “weekend days.”) During a given period of time, one shop in the study completed 600 production hours with 50 weekend days. That means for each weekend day that a vehicle sat at the shop, the shop produced 12 labor hours.
Once that shop moved away from “in on Monday, out on Friday” scheduling to bringing in and delivering about the same number of vehicles each day, the shop saw a 50 percent jump in the number of production hours it produced per “weekend day.” So for every day they had a car tied up over a weekend day, they produced 18 labor hours compared to 12 under the other scheduling system. That’s a 33 percent reduction in the number of vehicles tied up over the weekend.
Shops that have made the switch also say repair quality and customer satisfaction has improved as well. In the Thursday-Friday rush to deliver most of the week’s jobs on two days, small items and customer special-requests can often get overlooked, or staff may look for short-cuts that affect quality.
Resistance remains
Unfortunately, insurers want to be sure their cars are the ones not sitting over the weekend, and so efforts by shops to “even out the flow” are often resisted. But there are ways to move to some degree to a move even flow of work in and out of the shop each day. Customers will sometimes choose a mid-week drop-off when they are told that will get their vehicle in sooner than they would if they waited for a Monday opening. Certainly, any vehicle that will require six or more days to complete should always be scheduled for later in the week since it will sit over a weekend no matter when it’s dropped off.
Shops with even one or two loaner cars also can use that as a way to encourage or reward the customer willing to come in later in the week — without a fight with insurers over weekend rentals. Some shops have tried covering the costs of some weekend rentals because the gains in productivity with more even scheduling help offset these costs. •
John Yoswick, a freelance writer based in Portland, Ore., who has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988, is also the editor of the weekly CRASH Network bulletin (www.CrashNetwork.com). He can be contacted by email at john@CrashNetwork.com.
