This post was originally published on Auto Success
A colleague’s wife loves to hear someone go on about life’s routine challenges: “I’m too busy,” “I don’t have the time” or “I can’t lose weight.” Excuses are loopholes because we all find the time and resources for what we want. So, Cynthia encourages these individuals to track their daily activities or diet logs in 15-minute increments. When people do this, they get quantifiable clarity into how they invest their time or accountability for their daily diet.
Generality is the death knell of progress, so tracking what we do (or suspect is happening) brings specificity and focus to our lives and the lives of our businesses.
Tracking methods applied to vehicle movement throughout the car dealership improve workflow, reduce unapplied time losses and yield process improvements and progress.
When we use GPS, Bluetooth and other technologies to track a dealership’s operations, we create a digital mirror of its hard and soft assets — the movement of vehicles into and out of service, through reconditioning and from inventory to test drive to sold.
Better than a 15-minute time or diet tracking plan, mobile data tracking provides real-time increments. From a smartphone, the fixed ops director, recon manager or GM knows precisely where cars are within the store’s inventory ecosystem — and how staff engages with them along every step — and whether the key-to-key workflow progress will result in kept delivery promises. If not, staff will know within 40 minutes of a job so resources can be applied to ensure customer satisfaction.
Without this insight, these workflows operate at an assumed speed of efficiency and economic value — what you can observe and hope to improve through trial and error. When one service director brought this workflow tracking to his express service bays, he knew where to tweak processes, improve staff performance and eliminate bottlenecks and delays. These changes mean accurate delivery promises that improved CSI.
Another service director tracks service vehicle locations in the store or on the lot, so technicians aren’t wasting time scrambling to find their next job, wasting billable time. When a service director leverages tracking technology, these transformations are typical:
• Service times are reduced by an hour or more. Saving 15 minutes per repair order translates into $15.83 to $47.50 in financial gain at a $190 labor rate.
• Increased billable hours. Our analysis shows that, on average, cycle time management tools can help service departments add recovered billable hours to their day’s work. These lost billable minutes total 45 minutes per maintenance service. Recovering these 45 minutes on each service across 10 jobs per day can add 7.5 extra billable hours daily.
• Monthly operating savings of at least $2,000 per month, eliminating lost keys and key replacements, based on eliminating five $400 key losses per month.
• Satisfied customers, who move through the sales process faster because keys and cars are never misplaced, show your dealership is on top of things and sensitive to their time.
With a digital mirror of physical service department workflows feeding real-time data to a desktop or smartphone, service directors see how small movements of assets, people and processes can yield positive results, such as:
• Recovered Unapplied Time: Identify delays from arrival to write-up, staging to in-bay and service completion to vehicle delivery.
• Phase Duration: Measure the duration of each step in the service process to identify inefficiencies.
• Peak Times: Analyze time data to pinpoint specific days or times that consistently experience longer service times. “I tell people technology does not fix processes, but if we use it, it can help us improve outcomes,” said Ed Roberts, chief operating officer at Bozard Ford-Lincoln, with whom I spoke recently. “When information is available but not sought, that’s our fault, but if we use it, it certainly helps us out.”
