Why efficiency is the best gauge of your shop

A shop can be productive in a day. But is it being efficient over a wider scope?

That’s what Bryan Stasch, vice president of product and content development at the Automotive Training Institute, wants shops to measure themselves on.

Productivity is how much a technician gets done. Efficiency is measured per job and how well and how fast they do the job. Stasch doesn’t like to measure productivity by the day because jobs can roll over, so he prefers to measure by the week, month and year.

Part of enhancing efficiency is knowing how to properly use your shop management system. “Some of these management systems are phenomenal,” he said during his presentation Master the Chaos — Art and Science of a Successful Service Advisor. “But how many of you have your management system truly built for speed? Most [shops] do not have the management system set up the way it was built.”

At the Midwest Auto Care Alliance’s Vision Hi-Tech Training & Expo in March in Kansas City, Stasch urged shop owners to measure the efficiency of their shops. He had some simple advice: Pull up a chair and watch how the shop operates.

“Identify where you’re currently at. Get a sense of the flow. Does it feel right? And yes, this does mean pulling up a chair, sitting down and watching what’s going on,” he said.

And if your response to that suggestion is, “I don’t have time,” don’t say that around Stasch. Those are “the four words of death” to him.

“Find the time,” he said.

If you find something that needs work, reverse engineer it to solve the problem.

“Start with a finished product and work backwards — by when should that have been? What are the steps they had to do to complete it? Where could I have done better?” he said. “As a business owner … where could I have done better?

“Finding second finds minutes and finding minutes finds hours.”

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