A little stroll can reveal lots of good information
“The problem is, while the service manager sits in his office answering emails, oblivious to what is happening in the department (or elects to start at 9 a.m.), there are often numerous concerns going on in the department, which negatively impact both customer satisfaction and the bottom line.”
Have you ever been on board an aircraft when it roared down the runway with the captain sitting in the washroom? Of course not; this is one of the most critical times to get the plane in the air.
But it is amazing how many service managers believe it is OK to start work at 9 a.m., using the excuse that they stay late at night. This ignores the fact that start up is often the most critical part of the day. If the day starts off badly, that is how it often continues.
We like managers to be at the store before it opens, to walk the lot, check out the shop and see who is on board. You could find a vehicle parked with no work order on it, or you stop at a technician’s bench and note that they have more shop supplies than the parts department. Looking at the clocking-in cards you could note that five technicians were all punched in at the same time, did they all arrive by minivan?
Get out and coach
One thing is guaranteed: you can get more paper work done between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. than you can for the rest of the day. But when managers sit in their offices all day, it boggles the mind. The best way to coach a hockey team is by getting behind the bench with them as they battle, not by sitting in the locker room wondering why the team is losing.
It’s now 10 a.m. and it is time to start “managing by walking around” again. The 10 a.m. huddle can work miracles if you get together with your staff for a quick review on what is happening today, discuss any issues and review yesterday’s numbers. If you are not touching it, feeling it, or smelling it, you are not doing it!
Walk the shop again, talk to Joe, your tune up guy, and ask how the move to his new house went. Stop for a few minutes with your lubrication technician and ask him about his hockey game and how many air filters he sold yesterday. Grab Fred and discuss the comeback he had yesterday after a disastrous start. Talk to Bill, your top producing technician, whose productivity appears to have been dropping. “Did his wife leave him or just come back!” Telling the staff, “My office door is always open” just doesn’t cut it. Many of your staff won’t come to you with a concern, even if the place is on fire.
Can’t manage what you can’t see
In all fairness, the service manager’s job today does involve a huge amount of administration. Through DMS systems, the factory has craftily switched their workload onto the service managers allowing them to reduce their own operating expenses. We calculate that at least 50 per cent of the work done by a service manager is for the factory. So why aren’t they paying for half of their salary?
The problem is, while the service manager sits in his office answering emails, oblivious to what is happening in the department (or elects to start at 9 a.m.), there are often numerous concerns going on in the department, which negatively impact both customer satisfaction and the bottom line.
In the drive through, customers are lined up as the car jockey has not turned up for work, phones are not being answered and the walk-and- pop sheets that the service advisors all agreed to use are not being filled out. The customers’ early-bird envelopes are still in the drop-off box (so we know how early they are going to be) and customers are in the waiting room observing the mayhem and glancing at their watches.
Looking in the shop, we see only some of the technicians have turned up for work, the latecomers using the excuse: “We run out of work at 3 p.m. anyway, so what’s the point?”
Other technicians have arrived but are upstairs in the changeroom reading the newspaper. A percentage of the technicians left early in the day without asking permission, which is driving the service advisors crazy, but it is hard to see that from the service manager’s office.
Not wishing to pick on the technicians, we notice that two are not wearing safety boots and the used oil tank at the rear of the service department has been overfilled. But that is not the end of the concerns; we also see some of the technicians completing major work on vehicles (like brakes) and not carrying out a road test. Driving across the yard and stamping on the brake pedal might not be enough to ensure it was fixed right the first time.
This one is always interesting: It’s 3.30 p.m. in the afternoon, we observe service advisors turning away customers and by 4 p.m. the service department has run out of work. Now it is the end of the day and the service manager is still sitting in his office, looking at his daily operating control sheet and wondering if they are going to write red ink again this month.
All these concerns we have talked about are relatively easy to control if the manager is out managing by walking around.
It’s sad to say, but in meetings with the service manager and the dealer principal, we often get asked: “How did you find out all this stuff?” The answer is easy, we walked around and talked with the staff. We once encountered an embarrassing moment with a dealer when showing pictures of garbage and soil contamination at the rear of the dealership, his comments were, “Where were these pictures taken? This is not my dealership.” But it was. It’s amazing what you see when managing by walking around.
