We have met the competition and they are us. So improve your company to increase profits.
That is the idea behind the “Well Tuned Auto Shop” process that provides hands-on training to body shop and mechanical repair shop employees to reduce repair time, improve repair quality save money and increase profits. It is administered by Hudson Valley Technology Development Center in Fishkill.
“There is a mindset that having a parking lot full of cars to be repaired shows the business is busy and successful,” said Brian C. Wrye, HVTDC business development director. “Well, no, what that means is money sitting on the lot. You need to repair those cars and get them back to their owners.”
“Getting throughput is the key objective,” said Wrye. “There are a lot of shops out there and they tend to compete in price. And we are trying to show that rather than competing with the other shops you are really competing with yourself. Let us show how you can improve your own operation so that you can become more profitable.”
HVTDC has been offering “lean” training to small and mid-sized manufacturing companies for over a decade and the move to auto shops is a new program. Dave Tooker, an HVTDC delivery engineer, said the techniques are readily transferable because there are similar outcomes in the businesses. “They are transforming materials into different states, using labor and tools, so lean techniques translate well to this business,” said Tooker.
The process starts with a site visit technique called Value Stream Mapping, an operational assessment activity to create a “Current State” process map. “We get the people who run the process together and walk through it with them, for there is discovery in that,” said Tooker. “It helps them see their shop in a different way.”
That is followed by a session designing the perfect shop, “As if they could wave a wand,” Tooker said. “We generate numerous ideas on how that shop should operate”
The first part of the process, mapping current operations takes half a day and the follow up to mentally create the perfect shop takes another half day. HVTDC consultants take what they have learned and create a list of steps, categorized by impact and level of difficulty to implement and provides them to shop owners.
Between half to two-thirds of the ideas are low-difficulty, high-impact and can be implemented immediately. As an example, Tooker cited the idea of installing a highly visual progress chart tracking repairs for each car in the system. He said experience in lean manufacturing shows it to be a basically cost-free method of quickly improving efficiency. .
More difficult recommendations that might require capital investment go to shop owners for further consultation with HVTDC experts, who prepare a detailed analysis on costs, return for investments and ways to implement the idea. A shop switching from volatile organic (VO) paints to water-based paints might be an example of such a recommendation, Tooker said.
Costs of the program vary according to the shop involved, but Wyre said the results provide savings far in excess of costs within a very short time. For more information, call Brian C. Wrye HVTDC Business Development Director at 896-6934 Ext 3005.