Gavin interviewed Shaunna Ritchie from Mainline Auto Body and discussed her role at Mainline. Shaunna is a Service Advisor or Service Writer at Mainline and has been with the Company almost 13 Years.
The service writers’ job is to meet and greet the customer, find out about their claim, and then move the vehicle through to estimating and blueprinting. Once this is complete the vehicle is then returned to Shaunna and the customer to then arrange the booking in. Once everything is secured the client will then bring the vehicle back into the shop and Shaunna is responsible for that vehicle through the repair process.
Shaunna has been with Mainline since the implementation of Planning Plus so when asked what role Planning Plus has in her day her response was immediate – Planning Plus is my Day! When it was introduced Shaunna’s first thought was “this is something else to learn, something else I have to do!” By adding this to her daily routine it is now something she cannot live without. Her whole day from beginning to end is Planning Plus. “If the phone rings and I am out on the shop floor, everything I need is on that board, it helps plan the day, the week, everything, everything’s in there! Without it my day would be a chaotic mess, complete and utter chaos, could not survive without it.”
Shaunna’s interaction with Planning Plus is from an administration perspective. She does not plan the production side of things, but she is planning the admin tasks and updating a guest, putting notes on things, sending SMS messages etc. This keeps everyone in the loop. Mainline has a lot of KPI’s and systems in place and Planning Plus is a big part of these systems. Shaunna said an example of this is we time the process when a customer arrives to when it actually goes out the back to start production and also when the production is finished and the customer is then contacted to collect the car. Some shops would not rate these as important KPI’s but here at Mainline we understand the important of such measurements.
Systems and processes are huge at Mainline, but they work and are continuously being refined, defined, and improved. It is a never-ending cycle of innovation. After 13 years, the continuous innovation is something that Shaunna is used to. Owner Joe Hinkens has a rule of thumb, if he introduces a new process, he will get rid of two old processes. Joe is always trying to make the process leaner. It is all about winning back more time.
They are currently introducing a system call E.O.S. which is Entrepreneurial Operating System and Shaunna’s role in this system is on the sales team. They have a weekly L10 Meeting each Tuesday that runs for an hour. The meetings start off with “how are you? How was your weekend? What is new in your life? What’s exciting?” Only after these conversations do they talk about work. They go over the scorecards for sales and cycle times and then any issues that they might be having. Creatively together we are thinking of ways to make it better or find solutions to those issues.
The Culture at Mainline is amazing and we have a great team Shaunna added. We have been through some tough and rocky times, but everyone gets on and works well together, it is a home away from home which is a great as it is not a small business. There are forty two employees at Mainline so it is a lot to manage and keep forty two people engaged and respectful of each other.
That is another model they are working on – RESPECT which is very powerful, and the bottom part of RESPECT is T, which is for Trust. Trusting each other, taking care of each other, and having each other’s back, supporting as opposed to ridicule, blame, excuse or denial. The energy at Mainline is infectious. Every day is a new day, no job is the same and no two people are the same. You meet many different people, so each day brings a new challenge.