(If you haven’t read parts 7 & 8 , stop now and go read them first) YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THE GOAL WITH LEVEL SCHEDULING! In every department, Thursdays must look like Mondays and Tuesdays must look like Fridays!! For example: Your paint booth is open for business 5 days per week. So, every day the same amount of refinish hours (as much as possible) must be ran through our booths. From our example shop last week at 100 hours of available capacity per day. Let’s say 35% of those billed hours per day are refinish hours. That means 35 refinish hours must be ran through this example shops paint department every day. Monday = 35 / Tuesday = 35 / Wednesday = 35 / Thursday = 35 / Friday = 35. INSTEAD, in this example shop with all in on Monday train wreck scheduling, their paint booths throughput refinish hours per day looks like this: Monday = 15 / Tuesday = 30 / Wednesday = 50 / Thursday = 55 / Friday = 25. That right there is The Viscous Cycle! Now you are probably asking, “How do I level out my schedule?” When I was at Toyota in Georgetown, KY, Visual Management was extremely important! The employees there could tell in 5 seconds where they stood. This could be in the form of a software being used on a big visual monitor or manual boards. They also use Andon lights and audible tones of course.
I posted some photos of our scheduling board for you to have some understanding of what I mean by ‘Visual Management.’ I know some who are reading this, that likely have a more advanced Visual scheduling systems than I do. If so, PLEASE post photos to share & help others as I am trying to do here.
Like Toyota, at my shop we can look in 5 seconds to see where we have available capacity on our scheduling board, and we don’t have to take time to open some computer program either. You see the different coloured cards in my photos and each colour represents different triaged job sizes. The customer can also see it and understand it, as its on our wall in our front office. We have just created the white cards for non-drives, as so many have come in. This is how we can put some sanity into scheduling.
Let’s say, our example shop brings in 14 cars on a Monday at 30 hours each average severity. This example shop can likely only Blueprint 100 hours per day of work. At 14 cars X Avg. 30 billable hours each = 420 hours OR 4.2 days of work were brought in on a Monday!! This doesn’t include any non-scheduled drop offs and tow-ins from over the weekend or cars not Blueprinted from the prior week. Without any of the latter, car No. 14 at best has a ZERO chance of getting the Blueprint completed until Friday or four days after the day of drop-off.
Please understand the insane world that some shops put themselves in. Many shop owners are VERY quick to point fingers at all the outside forces for the problems inside their shops. These same shop owners need to take a good look in the mirror and have a one-on-one discussion. There is some smoking good $ in the collision repair industry, IF we just stop for a minute and look at what we are doing to ourselves!!
Side note: For my shop, concerning Level Scheduling, we used to use $’s rather than billed hours. Trouble with this method for us we found, if the goal was say $14k per day throughput: Two different days of work scheduled in at $14K, can look very different from the each other. One day’s incoming cars could need 75 billed hours Blueprinted and the next day cars would need 140 hours Blueprinted. For us there was just too much variation in our Blueprinting Dep. The slinky was being stretched too far one day and shrunk too much the next day.ecka
FYI: For 2022 at my shop, we are on track to hit $3.8mil and we are doing this with 9 total employees (front to back) including myself. That means each employee has over a $400k in gross sales value. For starters, this can only be done with leveling out each department from Scheduling to Delivery. This is a prerequisite for any size shop to reach a high net profit, whether your shop does $1,000,000 in gross sales or a $10,000,000. Size does NOT matter!