Sleeism # 5
Man is like the turtle…. You have to stick your neck out in order to get ahead
This is similar to some of the quotes in our Friday Filosophy today. No guts no glory. If you don’t try who can you blame but yourself. The course starts with the first step. There are many other pithy sayings that mean the same thing. The time is now.
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody – it saves so much trouble.
Rudyard Kipling
All glory comes from daring to begin.
Alexander Graham Bell
When the world around you is changing at a rate faster than you the end is near.
Jack Welsh
Some of you have equated the labor efficiency blog with the actual market capture rate of labor. They are two very different elements in the business. One measures the performance of the supervision of the labor pool and the efficiency of a particular technician on a specific job or group of work orders. The other measures how much of the available market the dealer in question has actually obtained and maintained.
The market capture rate is dependent on maintaining an accurate and up to date machine population and the hours of work for each of the machines in the dealer territory. With the arrival of GPS on most current production machines this is becoming easier to maintain and to track. Older machines, however, still outnumber new machines in most geographical jurisdictions and as such this remains an elusive goal.
If we have an accurate machine population as well as the hours of work for each machine then we can calculate the market potential for both parts and service. This is an important step in the maturation of the parts and service management as we will be able to determine the successes of each of the store locations in a territory. We will then need to become much more professional and effective in our processes, systems and skills when we deliver customer service. The Manufacturers and your bosses will be able to measure objectively how well we do our jobs. I think that will bring a lot more attention to the skills and execution of the management and supervision in parts and service. The time is now.
Service Departments the world over are concerned about efficiency and effectiveness. There is a very easy method in which we can measure and manage the labor we offer to the marketplace. There are two critical pieces of information from which we must start. The first is called Gross Profit Potential and the second is the actual gross profit.
Gross Profit Potential is the number that you would obtain if you took all of the labor in your department at the published labor rates and the average wages of the technicians employed. From these two numbers you would get the potential gross profit. Take that number and divide it be the published labor rate and you will get the gross profit potential. That is very straight forward and very easy.
The actual gross profit you can get from your financial statements. Just be sure that it is only labor.
Then a simple division will lead you to labor efficiency. Divide the actual gross profit by the gross profit potential and there you are – labor efficiency. How do you stand up in this measure? You must be over 90%. The time is now.
Well guess who is back. I have been conducting classes for the past four days and travelling for two of them so I have, unfortunately, neglected you. One of the sessions was on Customer Service and the other was on Parts Management. We start into a two day session tomorrow on Service Management.
It appears that the interest in employee development is beginning to pick up from the desperate savings that distributors were driving attempting ever since 2008 and Lehman. The bad news of these savings as noted in a previous blog is that employees see that and make note of it and when business picks up many of them will determine that the grass is greener on the other side of the hill and leave you.
The largest challenge over the foreseeable future is going to be to attract, hire and retain the talent required for the job functions in your business. And this is a very serious problem.
Automation will absorb some of the shortages but not all. Management, or better said leadership, is required to set the tone and the direction for employee development. The time is now.
Whether or not you think you can or you can’t. Either way you are right. Henry Ford
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him. James D Miles
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.
Sleeism # 4
It is hard to soar with the Eagles
If you are up all night with the Turkeys
Sometimes it is hard to remember that the morning comes awfully early. When you are having fun in the evening and into the early morning it is wise to remember that the sun comes up every day (so far) and that you have to be race ready when you get up. It is not a sign of weakness to get to bed in the middle of a party. It is purely an understanding of the responsibilities we have the next day. The time is now.
Many Dealer Management Systems (DMS) allow a dealer to access a manufacturers’ information on standard times that are used to reimburse the dealers for warranty work. There has long been disagreement as to whether the time provided is adequate. That having been said it is also true that someone is trying to help a dealer in establishing standard times for repairs – the suppliers.
So what if the time is inadequate? Or in some cases it might be too generous. That just means you need to do a little more work. Meet with your technicians and determine the factor to apply to the time in order that the work can be performed within the time, consistently, and allow you to develop a labor schedule to follow. Well this is where the DMS has to allow the dealers to apply factors to the times provided with the supplier interface and create dealer time files. Does your DMS allow this? Don’t you think it should? When you have reasonable times to apply to a job assigned to a technician you can build a schedule. With a schedule you can develop a completion date for all work. With a completion date that you can meet consistently you will get more business. Isn’t that what you want?
I suspect you should pose this question to your DMS provider. Can you take the standard times provided for warranty and apply a factor by component code, or operation, or a machine group or even machine model. If you can’t I submit to you that it is important to be able to do this simple thing. The time is now.
The Canadian Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said “When mankind is confronted with making a change or proving why they shouldn’t change…. why do people get busy with the proof?” The common excuse for resisting change is the same everywhere – fear. A lot of fears – fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear that others will be better than we are, a bunch of fears – to the point there is another interesting question to pose to yourselves “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” That is the more interesting question.
In our Unit I management training we deal with change and paradigms and I try and get people to understand that resistance to change is both natural and normal. Most of us are settlers not pioneers. The pioneer is the risk taker. They blaze the trail for the settlers. When the pioneer is finished with their explorations the settler will ask “is it safe out there?” Then if the answer is yes off they will go to the new lands. But the options available for the settlers are limited because the pioneer had the first choice.
I submit to you that your customers want you to be leading not following. They want you to lead the changes. And in this world in which we live change has become a fact of life. Change comes in waves it is not incremental. If you don’t get in on the initial waves you want to hope that you can enter later without a large loss. That is an interesting word – hope. Put with the subject of change it is really interesting. How has that worked for you so far? Not all change is good. So you have to be pretty discerning don’t you. You have to be able to evaluate the situation, consider the options and then make a decision. It doesn’t get easier over time. It might in fact lead you to missing out on chances. How do you view change? The time is now.
Some time back I looked around a room I was in and noticed that I was no longer the youngest person in the room. Of I course I still felt like the youngest in the room. But think back to when you started your first job. What did you think of the older people around you? Were they to be respected for their age and knowledge? Did you look at them wondering why they did things that particular way? Do you remember working with your father and how he was always telling you how to do things?
I think we in North America have a perverse method of teaching people at an early age. We teach them to be obedient. Now don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with obedience and manners. In fact I quite like them both. I do want to take issue with the fact that we are creating robots to some degree. We don’t teach people well enough to be critical thinkers. We don’t teach them to think on their own. And when they do think on their own we label them something – rebels, trouble makers and other names.
I think we need to embrace the younger generation in a more positive manner. Every younger generation gets a bad rap including the current crop of kids (maybe I shouldn’t call them kids). Imagine. They are better educated. They have more computer skills than were dreamt of when I was entering the work force. The attribute that I like the most is that they are not as patient as we were. They won’t put up with the nonsense that some of us endured. Are you ready to listen to what they have to say? Can you imagine that they might have a better way to do something? I get excited when someone asks the question “why do you do it that way?” I want to know what they mean, what they are thinking. There is always the possibility to do things better. You have to embrace these changes as never before. The time is now.
All students who take Subject Specific bundle of 4 classes are eligible to earn 2 Continuing Education Credits (CEU’s).
You must score 80% or higher on ALL classes. This completion entitles you to receive a certificate of achievement. This certificate will also highlight the number of CEU’s you have earned.
All students who take a Subject Specific class are eligible to earn 0.5 of a Continuing Education Credits (CEU).
You must score 80% or higher to obtain a passing mark for the class. This completion entitles you to receive a certificate of achievement. This certificate will also highlight the number of CEU’s you have earned.
