Chapter 19
Gus's Garage

By Jake Snyder

Gus had a break from JJ in December and he is ready to make great strides in 2002. He wants to start the New Year by working on two issues: reducing vehicle inventory and improving process consistency.

Over the holidays Gus read The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eli Goldratt. I bought the book for Gus six months ago and he finally got around to reading it.

The Goal is an entertaining novel, first published in 1984, that introduces a manufacturing strategy called "Theory of Constraints."

The theory describes methods to eliminate production bottlenecks and increase output by developing improvement processes to reduce and eliminate inventory accumulation points in a fictional manufacturing facility. I highly recommend Goldratt's book for shop owners and managers.

Although the storyline gets lost at the end, it is not hard to read in one or two sittings, and the production management issues and solutions can be applied to collision repair production issues.

Prompted by The Goal, Gus compared product inventory to customers' cars that were assigned to work-in-process (WIP), but were not actually being worked on by techs. Gus and I did a shop walk-through and counted the extra cars just sitting in and around each metal tech's workspaces.

There are 5 metal techs in Gus's Garage and there were 15 cars in the metal department. By comparison, the paint department had 5 cars including 1 in the booth, 1 in cool-down and 3 in various stages of prepping. The detail area had 3 cars - 2 in work bays and 1 waiting to be cleaned.

The metal department had a higher ratio of WIP cars to technicians compared to those in paint and detail; and the idle-time per car also appeared to be longer in metal than in paint.

We also observed that the average quantity of jobs that flow into the paint and detail departments daily are roughly equal to number of cars that flow out daily.

Paint and detail produces about five cars daily while carrying nowhere near the amount of vehicle inventory that the metal department carries to produce the same number of jobs.

It was apparent that the final assembly process also produces work at pretty much the same rate in which they are assigned to final assembly. When assigned to final assembly, jobs are usually completed the same day. There is minimal WIP vehicle inventory in final assembly.

Gus and I had basically been describing just-in-time (JIT) repair processing strategies as a way to eliminate WIP vehicle inventories and improve operating efficiency. The goal of JIT is to respond to jobs as they show up. Paint, final assembly, detail and even front-end or pre-production processes are geared to varying degrees towards JIT processing.

What Gus needs to do then, is to develop the middle processing steps or metal department actions to be more like the other Departments and process jobs as they show up without having to carry high WIP vehicle inventory levels.

Looking at how the paint department works is a good way to find new approaches for managing production flow in the metal department. Gus's paint team of two preppers and one painter usually processes the prepping and painting of five cars in a single shift.

Because this is an accepted daily paint production standard for both management and techs, processing steps that occur immediately before and during paint usually receive more management attention to assure the paint department is working at just the right pace or capacity.

The after-paint repair processing steps are also usually completed at the same repair pace as painting, and in the same sequence that the different job types have left the paint department.

From the time jobs leave the paint department until final completion, jobs usually move through the final repair stages at the same sequence and pace they left the paint booth. Workflow usually becomes more deliberate and easier to manage after leaving the paint department.

Paint and after-paint processing also illustrates how management and staff have learned to use flexible production methods that respond to fluctuations in daily work volume without significantly increasing vehicle inventory or production resources.

Like most shops, Gus's Garage schedules in most work early in the week and delivers most of the work at the end of the week.

As we all know, this usually results in trying to find paintwork on Mondays, and a huge wave of paintwork on Thursday and Friday. Somehow the paintwork always gets done, and most times without having additional techs to help out on Thursdays or Fridays.

Gus's management techniques have also developed in the same way. He has learned to identify paint department issues as they come up and provide quick solutions.

When he sees that the paint team is not able to achieve 5 cars a day, Gus knows to look for solutions in specific areas of the paint department. He knows to look at equipment usage, work quality or re-work, training or technicians' skill levels, staff-ing deficiencies, or maybe even the flow of work from the metal department.

Actually, except for the metal department, JIT processing has become institutionalized in almost all areas of Gus's Garage.

To find a way to apply these learnings to the metal department, we first looked at differences between metal and paint.

One difference is that the paint department works as a team and the metal department has individual technicians. Another is that metal department vehicle repair options or combinations of work actions needed for different job types are more numerous than what the paint department faces.

It takes a lot more brainpower to control and manage vehicle flow during the metal stage of repair processing than it does for jobs once they hit the paint department.

Each metal tech is like an individual work cell with different skills and capabilities. Each one also has WIP inventory of cars that can be all over the shop and in different stages of repair. Some cars may be in a tech's work space, others can be in paint, some might be on hold for authorizations, and still other cars can be in sublet or mechanical. When these are multiplied by the number of metal techs, it is easy to see why workflow management for the metal stage of repair processing can be challenging.

I told Gus to think about how much easier it would be to have his metal department operate in the same way the paint department does. As jobs come in, they are assigned to metal teams that know exactly what to do with each job, regardless of size or complexity. Like the paint department, their primary goal would be to process cars as they arrive.

Jake Snyder, creator of the popular Gus’s Garage series, is interested in hearing from shop owners with real-life questions.
E-mail JJ the Remote Pro, Gus’s intrepid consultant.