Dale is the Production Manager at Mainline, and he utilizes one of their fully mobile office carts. These carts are running the computer, dual monitors and a printer. They are battery operated with a power convertor. Gavin spent some time with Dale to talk about his role and the benefit of these carts.
What is your role with Planning Plus, and what difference has it made to you as a Production Manager?
Planning Plus is a vital key ingredient of what I do. I basically plan every single box that you see from the parts tab down. So basically, from here down, that’s all me using our twenty twenty lists to see when the vehicles coming in, what the part status is and when I’m going to plan it. And then dropping the boxes from the body, paint, reassembly to the detail, to the quality check. As we have discussed before, I do not know any other way. I have come from the service industry and we had something similar, but nothing as key as this, this thing is just the cat’s Meow when it comes to letting everybody in the house, know what’s going on so that I don’t have to over communicate. It used to be that my phone was ringing probably every minute on questions and now with the way this system’s designed with our flags in place, and the way that we can enter the notes into the system, everybody in the house knows where the answer is before they call me. A lot of times, they are just calling me to verify rather than to ask me what the status of the vehicle is, to make sure we are still on target. This system helps us to achieve our goals and to make sure we are planning accordingly and not trying to over schedule.
With our introduction of the mobile cart it helps me by having CCC and Planning Plus running side by side at all times, my messaging systems is live at all times, and having the printer combination scanner so that I can attach all my post scans, my frame specs, my alignment specs, that comes in handy. I can do everything from this and what this enables me to do is to be at the car at the time. Like right here, I have supplement forms, so that we can add to the work order as in real time and Planning Plus is real time. Having a mobile cart, I could be at the vehicle and change everything in real time, then as I am rolling around, I can see the status on a vehicle. If they are going to need more time or if they are going to finish sooner. I can plan accordingly. In my view, I always have five days up at a time, I was already planning next week here earlier. My role is just continuous, just making sure that in conjunction with the planning board, that our floor itself is keeping and maintaining our status.
If we talk efficiency, what do you feel as being the efficiency improvements since Planning Plus was introduced?
It has increased tremendously. Now, granted, if you look at some of our overall numbers, we have added a lot of bodies in the interim, so sometimes our overall efficiency isn’t where it used to be as far as being monitored, but as far as the board itself and the knowing what the people are capable of doing and when they are finished, it was a dramatic increase. I mean, you can notice just by instantly dropping the boxes and then noticing how fast they were finishing what I have already allocated, knowing that it has already been catered towards that tech. So, for instance, if I had a tech that is a 200%, or when I dropped those boxes for him, it already catered to him to finish at a certain time that is going to match his efficiency so that the if CCC one said it was 20 hours with the body. And I dropped it over here for a 200% tech and it said it was 10 hours and he finished it in 8, that even shows me even more that we’re knocking it out of the park as far as efficiency. And this is a gauge for them to say, Hey, I want to finish it sooner than the 10 hours you gave me, even though they probably could have looked at their ROI and saw they had more time. They watch the board rather than watching the papers and that is a bonus all around. Planning Plus improves the communication, improves the efficiency you have got, as I can see, there is a message there that’s come from Curtis and that’s through the internal messenger system.
So, you are running CCC parallel with Planning Plus there on the mobile cart. That is a pretty cool setup for a Production Manager?
Great set up. And I am kind of putting more things on it as time goes on, you can see, I have my dispatch stamp, my revised stamp on the backside. You can see as I am doing my final inspections, I am pulling these off the windshield so that I kind of just made it to where everything I need is from here. I am not having to run back and forth from the office. Everything is using our Toyota way as far as putting a magnet on here so that they can just attach to the side, just trying to come up with ways that everything I need is here when I need it.