Helping and empowering your existing staff can be great way to increase productivity.

It’s no secret that many auto service centres across the country are struggling with technician shortages.

While many of us would like to find more technicians and are actively looking to recruit new people into the industry through partnerships with trade schools and apprenticeship programs, the fact remains that we still have businesses to operate. And, if we are short of licensed technicians, we need to do what we can to maximize the productivity of those techs we already have.

Staff and shop efficiency

To really understand the issue, you need to look at two different aspects, your technicians and taking care of them, and the current efficiency of your shop.

And it’s shop efficiency that’s key. If we take a working labour average of 8.5 hours per day per technician, that will give you around 25 hours if your shop has three licensed technicians. If you have, let’s say two apprentices, because they are learning and require mentorship, that number will decline, let’s say four hours per apprentice, so you end up with 21 hours in total per day.

Then, if you lose one licensed technician and only have two working, then you might be down to 17 hours per day, based on the 8.5 hours per tech, per day. When it comes to billable hours that is what you should be billing per day. But, if you have two great technicians that are very efficient and they can get R/Os completed and move onto the next job, there is no reason why you can’t reach between 9 and 11 or even 12 hours per day per technician.

Two versus three

So, with two licensed technicians there’s no reason why you can’t achieve 19 or even 20 hours per day, almost the same that you would have done with three licensed technicians. This kind of efficiency is achievable and can make a significant difference when you’re faced with labour shortages, but there are some things to consider.

Firstly, to make these kinds of numbers work, you need to have solid systems and procedures in place. You need to make your customers accountable; you need to be pre-booking appointments so you can handle larger R/Os and don’t end up doing small jobs on the same vehicle on different days.

Additionally, you also need to have complete buy-in from your entire staff, which not only includes the technicians, but service advisors, and management, for a vehicle inspection and customer intake process.

When you bring clients in, you need to make sure you have their contact information and make sure they are informed on what’s happening with their vehicle. You also need to ensure you perform the inspection and get paid for it, so when the customer brings the vehicle back in, the parts are already available.

Because the parts are already there and you’ve billed for the inspection, it makes the technician more efficient with their time doing the service or repair and if you do this on a consistent basis, you’ll find that you can bill roughly the same hours as you could before when you had an additional licensed technician.

Office issue

If you’re not getting to this level of billable hours and your techs are efficient, then you have an office problem, not a technician problem. That’s why you need to look at your systems and procedures to make sure your maximizing overall business efficiency and billable hours.

While these kinds of efficiencies can help address gaps in your labour force, to maintain efficiency long term you need to make sure that you are taking care of the technicians you have. If they are doing their work efficiently and taking less time to complete each R/O, the last thing they want is to be rewarded with another job during the day. If they have completed 9.5 hours of work by mid-afternoon, why not send them home or buy them ice cream or pizza? If the numbers are good there is no reason why you shouldn’t be rewarding them. If all you do is reward them with more work for being efficient, then they will leave, and you’ll be stuck in the cycle of trying to hire new technicians and paying a premium to do so, while your shop efficiency and profitability continues to decline.