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Letter to the Editor

Smarter Scheduling

Can moving away from the in on Monday out on Friday scenario improve cycle time AND cut rental costs?

Leonard Lassek suggests that shop owners take a moment to think from their customer's perspective when it comes to scheduling in collision repair work.

Lassek, owner of Thoroughbred Collision Centers, a multi-shop business in the Pacific Northwest, said the common practice of scheduling a lot of cars in on Monday in order to deliver most cars by Friday can create a chaotic experience for the rush of customers on those two days.

"Your customers came in mid-week for an estimate, and the office was peaceful and quiet, like Hawaii on a summer day," Lassek said. "They think, 'What a wonderful experience that was; I can't wait to go back and drop my car off on Monday.' They show up on Monday morning and the place looks like Baghdad under attack. There are twelve people waiting in line for rental cars, and there are panicky estimators trying to get cars checked in. The customers now are questioning your ability. After all, it looked calm one day, but today it looks chaotic. You've already set the tempo for when those customers come to pick up those cars. They're already questioning what to expect because of what you look like one day compared to the next."

But appearances may not be the only good argument against the "in on Monday, out on Friday" scheduling method so common in the collision repair industry. A recent study - as well as anecdotal evidence from shops around the country - indicates that scheduling vehicles more evenly throughout the week can improve a shop's productivity and reduce cycle time - without spiking rental car costs for insurers.

Bad scheduling habits

It's easy to understand why so many shops have fallen into the habit of scheduling the bulk of vehicles into the shop early in the week. Neither insurers nor customers are wild about the idea of vehicles sitting idle over a weekend while the shop is closed. And having a week's supply of vehicles on-site ensures there's always another one to work on if something forces a halt to repairs on another.

But Tom Holmes of Holmes Body Shop, which has eleven southern California locations, said that process can create logjam after logjam in the shop as that glut of work moves through the shop's departments at the same time. He equates it to watching a snake eat a rat.

"They eat the thing whole," Holmes says. "That's like a shop taking thirty jobs in on Monday. Then you can watch as that rat travels down through the snake's body. That's just what happens in our shops. This bottleneck moves through each department along the way. First you can't get everything written up. Then the parts department can't possibly order and receive everything. Meanwhile the body men are sitting there twiddling their thumbs. And then Wednesday or Thursday comes and everyone thinks the paint shop is the bottleneck. It may not be the bottleneck; it may be you've just created your own bottleneck with this giant lump of jobs trying to flow through the shop."

In working to develop some scheduling software for shops, Kent Carlson, owner of Collision Resources, Inc. in Libertyville, Ill., conducted a 10-month study of three collision repair businesses. The study looked at the three shops (with annual sales of $1 million, $2 million and $4 million, respectively) for a ten-month period - five months before and five months after switching away from "in on Monday, out on Friday" scheduling.

"If you can better balance out your schedule, we've seen that cycle times have dropped by an average of two days, with a 31 percent improvement in the hours produced per repair order per day," said Carlson, now co-chairman of the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) Cycle Time Task Force. "Obviously those are some pretty significant results for the shops."

The reason for the improved performance is pretty apparent if you look at most shops' parking lots on Mondays and Tuesdays; there are often more vehicles on-site than can immediately move into production, so many of those vehicles sit idle for one, two or even three days before much if any work begins. In addition, the parts for all these vehicles are often on-site, reducing the shop's capacity.

"The other thing is that at the end of the week you're trying to deliver so many vehicles, that it puts a real strain on the resources - painting, reassembly detailing - to get those vehicles delivered," Carlson said.

A better alternative, Carlson suggests, is to bring in essentially an equal amount of work each day, so that an equal amount of work is delivered each day.

Rental vehicle costs decline

But won't bringing vehicles in on Thursdays and Fridays jack up rental vehicle costs for insurers as those vehicles sit at the shop over the weekend?

"In the study the answer was no," Carlson said. "What we saw from the study was that on all the vehicles, on average, we saved two days. So the fact that you had some of the vehicles carry over an extra two days is offset by the fact that the average of all the vehicles was a two-day decrease in cycle time."

Carlson said this can be demonstrated by comparing labor hours produced to "weekend days." (One car sitting idle over a two-day weekend equals two "weekend days.") During a given period of time, one shop completed 600 production hours with 50 weekend days. That means for each weekend day that a vehicle sat at the shop, the shop produced 12 labor hours.

Once that shop moved away from "in on Monday, out on Friday" scheduling to bringing in and delivering about the same number of vehicles each day, the shop saw a 50 percent jump in the number of production hours it produced per "weekend day."

"For every day they had a car tied up over a weekend day, they produced 18 labor hours compared to 12 under the other scheduling system," Carlson said. "That's a 33 percent reduction in the number of vehicles tied up over the weekend." Will the change happen?

Carlson is the first to admit his findings are based on just one study, but a number of individual shops report similar results.

Illinois shop owner Jeanne Silver, for example, said her shop now brings in four or five vehicles each day, and is producing between 4 and 5.8 more production hours per day than it did under "in on Monday, out on Friday" scheduling. She said the problem of the paint shop having no work at times and being swamped at others has also been nearly eliminated.

The more even work flow also makes the first and last parts of the week less hectic and stressful for office and production employees, as well as for customers dropping off or picking up their vehicles, Lassek said. He believes resistance from insurers to such scheduling will eventually decline as they see improvements in cycle time and customer satisfaction.

Admittedly, in many markets, particularly in the Midwest lately, scheduling has been painfully easy lately. Many collision repair facilities are experiencing very slow times right now, and some repair stalls are standing empty. By comparison, being too busy sounds like a great problem to have. However, when daily business is less than overwhelming may be a good time to put some management energy into planning ahead for increased efficiency when repairs start rolling in again.   o

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