Industry Voices | It’s Cycle Time

Service directors are mindful of the abilities of their shops’ technicians to service customers’ vehicles quickly. Where efficiency is lacking, customers go elsewhere, and the shop loses billable hours.

There is no shortage of promising ideas for closing this proficiency gap. They include scheduling tools, shop management programs, sophisticated process analysis systems and communications software that makes it easier for advisors to talk with technicians and vice versa to keep customers abreast of work progress on their vehicles.

A National Automobile Dealers Assn. white paper, Managing Your Service Department for Profit, notes the service director runs an efficient and profitable service department through “productive staffing, customer retention, cost controls achievement of objectives and maintenance of service records...and ensures that the daily inventory of technicians’ time is consistently sold to service customers.”

Execute well here, and the department will be well on its way to delivering its fixed absorption rate goals and satisfying customers. Service directors are now also adopting cycle time management automation to identify, track and remove time-wasting bottlenecks and unapplied time costs from their service workflow.

Cycle time and its cousin, Takt time – a German word meaning rhythm – are lean-manufacturing or lean-process measurements. Takt time measures the pace at which work must be done to meet delivery promises. Cycle time measures that pace to identify where steps can be removed or improved to pick up that pace.

For instance, a high-volume Toyota dealership uses cycle time management in its express service lanes. Vehicle and process tracking is done through GPS and Bluetooth technologies.

These devices are placed throughout the service drive, write-up stations, service bays and elsewhere. Upon customer check-in, advisors place a transponder-enabled hang tag on the vehicle's rearview mirror that “talks” to these devices. The tag provides real-time vehicle tracking through the service workflow and wherever the vehicle may be in that process or parked outside waiting for customer delivery.

The service director there reports this workflow technology has improved customer wait times by 43% and increased technician bay turns by a similar improvement. Likewise, every service workflow has an average of 12 opportunities for improvement, from vehicle intake to customer delivery – known as key-to-key time – to monetize efficiencies and recover hidden billable hours from:

Cycle time management allows everyone involved to do their job better. Near real-time feedback engages their competitive spirits in making changes — in process or attitude — that monetize workflow for higher production and customer satisfaction.