Up Your Business is an exclusive GEARS Magazine feature in which I share stories, insights, and reflections about business and life challenges.
Torque Converters is the theme of this issue of GEARS. I couldn’t help but reflect on the evolution of converters during my 40+ year career. In the past, technicians considered the torque converter the most inefficient powertrain component. Before the invention of low-stall and lock-up converters, experts claimed that 6% or more of powertrain efficiency was lost in the torque converter. But today’s converters improve overall powertrain efficiency.
Just as converter efficiency improved through engineering improvements, technician efficiency has improved with innovative tools, equipment, shop management software, and better management skills. This article focuses on how you can improve technician efficiency.
While many factors affect performance, I titled this article, One Thing Can Boost Tech Efficiency because I believe in making incremental changes. You could call it making “one-at-a-time” changes.
I’ll discuss several things to consider changing, but I think you should choose just one. Depending on your circumstances, your selection criteria might be the quickest, easiest, least expensive, or something else, but in any case, you’ll have better results if you choose to make one change at a time.
With that said, some types of changes will impact more than just one thing or involve contemporaneous changes. For example, suppose you decide to start rebuilding torque converters in-house. In that case, many aspects of your business will be affected – new equipment, new tech(s) or tech training, added inventory, process changes, and more. Still, you can introduce it incrementally, one step at a time.
I recently had a telephone conversation with Sari Rivera of ETE. Sari writes articles for ETE’s Reman U. We were discussing the question, “When a shop adds a new, efficiency-boosting piece of equipment, why does it often sit gathering dust?” We agreed that the following four steps could help prevent this problem.
- Sell it to the team. Give them a reason to want to use it. Rather than just telling them to use it, involve them in the decision and get their buy-in.
- Demonstrate that the new tool or new method not only works, but it works better, faster, and makes their job easier.
- Teach them how to use it and make the new tool or equipment easily accessible. Encourage the team to use it.
- Get the team’s feedback on it. If it’s not working as advertised, find out why. You might decide to send it back – don’t force them to use something that’s hindering them.
Note that these four steps have little to do with the skill or efficiency of the technicians themselves but rather, how you lead. You affect performance by what you do or fail to do regarding your team members.
Besides the three core attributes of good attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities, what do top-performing technicians have in common? At last year’s Expo, I presented The Zone – The Secret to Achieving Super-Productivity. People describe being in the zone as achieving peak performance – greater than usual skill, strength, accuracy, speed, and endurance.
When your shop is in the zone, your team achieves unprecedented results effortlessly. Everything flows seamlessly from one job to the next. It’s as though you can do nothing wrong.
Being in the zone provides much of what employees want from their work.
- Success — They want to master what they do and receive immediate feedback, recognition, and respect for it.
- Fair Compensation — Note the word is fair, not high pay, more money than the other guy, or some other similar catchphrase.
- A Good Fit — Feeling comfortable and reasonably challenged in the job and enjoying the work environment, including the people.
- Meaning — Feeling that their work matters – that it’s purposeful and significant. For instance, auto techs don’t just fix cars; they fix people’s transportation problems.
Let’s look at five things you could do to incorporate the above zone-producing factors and boost your shop’s efficiency.
- Establish a baseline of current performance levels for each tech and a composite for the entire technical team. The best way to do this is with a concept called adjusted capacity.
This is important because it’s vital to track how productivity is trending. You need to determine your shop’s current level of productivity as the starting point for measuring progress.
Your shop’s production capacity isn’t the total number of hours your techs work per week. It’s the number of hours of tech time that a shop can sell and produce per day, week, month, or year.
Here are the steps to calculate the adjusted capacity for one technician for one week. Do this for each tech and then combine them to determine the shop’s weekly combined adjusted capacity.- Calculate the number of hours the tech is at work per week.
- Estimate how many of those hours are available for doing work. Deduct for the following.
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- Structured lost time — breaks, lunch, paid holidays, paid sick days, paid vacations.
- Process-related lost time — time spent waiting for job assignments, time spent waiting for parts or ordering parts, time spent performing technical research or calling a tech hotline.
- Underemployed lost time — doing non-billable work like cleaning the shop, running customers home, stocking parts inventory, or other things that waste the tech’s ability to produce revenue that matches his skill value
- Non-revenue jobs — warranty repairs or fixing another technician’s mistakes
- Technician efficiency — How long does it take this tech, on average, to perform a job compared to the time allowed in the shop’s labor guide? For instance, if he can do a 2-hour job in 1.5 hours, he has an efficiency factor of 133% (2 divided b y 1 .5 = 1 .33). But if it takes him 3 hours to do a 2-hour job, he has a 67% efficiency factor (2 divided by 3 = 0.67).
- While this might seem like a daunting task, once you’ve done it a few times, it’ll go quickly. There are easy-to-use time clock features available as add-ons to most shop management computer systems, making the calculations a snap.
- Use adjusted capacity in setting production goals.
- Since production hours are the best measure of a shop’s efficiency, why not use adjusted capacity to measure the technical proficiency of the shop?
- Set short-term targets for improving adjusted capacity for each technician and the combined team.
- Employees typically perform better when trying to achieve a goal, but they need to understand how they directly influence the achievement of the goal.
- People like games with winners and losers and provide performance feedback. How interesting would it be to play a game that conceals the results from you? Imagine bowling and only hearing the pins crash because they’re hidden behind a curtain that drops down after the ball is on its way down the alley.
- When the shop focuses on sales dollars, it doesn’t register with techs. They need to understand how improvements in their adjusted capacity translate into more billable hours and greater success for everyone.
- Provide rewards when techs exceed their respective individual targets. Give production team bonuses when the team exceeds composite production targets.
- Bonuses based on shop sales have little effect on the tech team members. But they do understand hours produced and will respond favorably to rewards based on that.
- Celebrate achievements. Acknowledge individual techs when they set new production records. Being noticed by the boss and getting high fives from peers energizes everyone.
- When the production team sets a record, it’s time for pizza! Make it fun and exciting.
- Remove obstacles to productivity. Here are some common obstacles:
- Assigning a job to the wrong technician — When you give a job to the right tech, they have a better chance to beat the book time, increasing technician efficiency. We refer to this as a “good fit.”
- Technicians waiting for the parts for their assigned job is a process problem you need to fix.
- Jobs hung up in the office waiting for customer authorizations is also a process problem. This one is almost invisible because it doesn’t directly affect the technicians’ efficiency. It does affect adjusted capacity, though, because it’s a bottleneck. Shop software systems can save front office time with features like:
- Streamlined check-in process that automatically populates the repair order with vehicle and customer information
- VIN readers
- Sending customers text messages with estimates and pictures of the damaged parts
- Obtaining customers’ authorizations by text
- Ordering parts directly from the repair order
- Online tech support
- Rushed diagnostics — when a tech lacks sufficient time for a thorough diagnosis, it can cost the shop in several ways.
- Lost sales by overlooking needed repairs
- Misdiagnosis leads to longer repair times, warranty repairs, and other types of comebacks. • Delayed job assignments – only assigning one job at a time.
- It’s better to keep at least one job on the board ahead of the technician. That way, he knows there’s a job waiting. This eliminates the work expanding to fill the time syndrome.
- Sometimes a tech can jump on the next job while another is hung up for parts, authorizations, or technical research.
- Provide a first-class work environment. This shows that you care and respect your team members.
- Start with a comfortable shop area. It’s been proven that happy technicians are more productive. What could make a technician happier than working in a climate-controlled shop?
- Provide state-of-the-art equipment and diagnostic tools. Some equipment is too expensive for each technician to purchase.
- Let the team know that you care about them and want them to care about customers. Nurture a customer-centric service culture. Remind the techs that they don’t just fix cars – they fix customers by solving their transportation problems.
These steps to greater efficiency are most effective when accompanied by a company culture that genuinely cares about its employees. When employees are treated well, so are the customers they serve.
These processes are easier to implement incrementally – one step at a time. Also, note that greater efficiency starts with the leader providing an efficiency-nurturing work environment – conducive to producing In-the-Zone experiences.
Last year’s Expo Tech and Management presentations, including my session, The Zone, are now available on the ATRA website.
About the Author
Thom Tschetter has served our industry for nearly four decades as a management and sales educator. He owned a chain of award-winning transmission centers in Washington State for over 25 years.
He calls on over 30 years of experience as a speaker, writer, business consultant, and certified arbitrator for topics for this feature column.
Thom is always eager to help you improve your business and your life. You can contact him by phone at (480) 773-3131 or e-mail to coachthom@gmail.com.