Chapter 21
Gus's Garage

By Jake Snyder

It has been 30 days since Gus started his process quality control in Gus's Garage. The objective of the process quality control is to measure how well Gus's repair order job actions are performed.

By measuring the frequency and types of breakdowns that occur in both administrative and technical processing of customers' jobs, Gus can gather objective data on how effective his processes are achieving desired results.

Gus can isolate operating problems and concentrate improvement efforts on specific areas of his shop by using process performance measures. Both administrative and technical staff members who perform job actions on the repair order and the customer's vehicle are required to inspect the quality of the job during hand-offs between key processing areas.

Upon completion of each processing stage, the staff member expected to perform the next stage of processing is required to take a couple of minutes and record whether or not the job meets acceptable quality standards. This must be completed before continuing work on the job; again, work actions are both administrative and technical.

When all administrative and technical work is complete, the number of exceptions or non-conformances to the quality standards are totaled and tabulated.

In order to start the quality control process immediately and with minimal staff training, we pre-selected the process failures or exceptions for the staff to choose from and record on process quality forms. As the quality system becomes more familiar to employees and management, there will be less of a need to restrict employee job-quality feedback to narrowly defined choices.

Gus's long-term process quality control goal is to have a quality assurance system imbedded into his operations in a way that enables immediate identification of any processing failures and breakdowns.

The biggest challenge in implementing the process quality control system was getting the employees and staff to stop and take a minute or two to quality inspect and make a check mark and/or comment on the quality control form.

Although Gus and I had given employees a short training session prior to roll-out on the quality control system, we found that the first two weeks still required constant coaching and monitoring.

Gus's employees understand the importance of inspecting work between hand-offs, and do a good job identifying problems, but they felt it a waste of time to use a form to record problems or exceptions.

Gus's employees are quality conscience and consider themselves dedicated to customer service, so it was hard for them to understand why, if they are already doing a good job, valuable time must be used to make entries on a quality control form.

Gus also felt his staff might have thought that management would use the quality control feedback as another employee measure, perhaps threatening their continued employment or likelihood of getting a raise or promotion.

Gus and I coached employees through these issues by explaining that the quality control system was focused on process and operating system effectiveness - not individual people. We had to constantly emphasize to staff that there is a return for them, customers, and the company to handle a job action as early in the overall operating process as possible, and to do the correct job action every time.

It was easy for us to use real life process breakdowns or non-conformances as examples to illustrate why this quality assurance system needed continuous measurement for fine-tuning the overall operating system.

All staff understood the headaches and problems caused by process failures such as: incorrect customer billing statements, comebacks and re-work, and missing or incorrect parts.

Coaching conversations were carefully balanced to explain that operations and shop personnel were doing most things right, but that Gus's Garage needed to work on reducing the frequency of process break-downs that often lead to bigger problems and dissatisfied customers. Generally, employee-coaching sessions were a lesson in how measurement is necessary for improvement.

To further convince employees that process performance measures were valuable, we compared the job control system to the customer service survey and customer service index (CSI) that Gus has been using for the past six months.

Gus's employees responded favorably to monthly CSI measurements and customer feedback that was now regularly posted. Because Gus keeps a consistent shop emphasis on the need for high CSI marks, employees have become more quality conscience of job processing actions and the potential impact on customer satisfaction survey results.

We pointed out to employees that since this performance measure has been installed, management has not had to reprimand or criticize any one individual employee for being the cause of poor CSI. Instead, the emphasis has been on overall shop or team performance.

Gus had looked at multiple CSI tools before deciding to use his card-based customer feedback mechanism. The cost of the CSI service was the primary consideration for Gus.

The card-based survey had a lower unit cost per customer survey than other telephone-based services while still being able to provide the same customer response levels. When Gus had asked for my feedback, I told him that cost per customer survey was important, but that a good customer response was more important.

A good customer response is based on two factors: the percentage and timeliness of responses compared to the number of jobs completed and when the jobs were delivered; and the quality of the customer's feedback.

The card-based service delivered a 30 percent to 40 percent customer response rate per jobs completed when the shop pre-sold the customer on the survey. I also considered the mail-in cards as less intrusive on today's customers who are becoming more and more sensitive to untimely telephone inquiries.

Since Gus valued the CSI results more as an internal operating and performance measure than as a marketing tool, I thought the cards would solicit much more objective feedback.

Phone surveys include the possibility that a friendly voice will prompt a positive response. However, Gus may sometimes lose valuable feedback because a live-voice customer survey may be able to expand on and explore service issues not listed on card questionnaires.

Still, the card-surveys do allow for other customer comments and Gus's customers often expand their service feedback by writing comments on the survey cards.

With his CSI measures, process quality control measures, and financial measures, Gus is developing a more balanced scorecard of company performance that can give him a better picture of how well his shop is performing.

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.