Getting more out of the technicians you have

Every fleet is short of technicians and no article will fix the labour market. What can be fixed is how much of a technician’s day goes to something other than working on vehicles, which in most shops is more than half of it.

Find out where the day goes first

Before changing anything, sample it. Note what each technician is doing at twenty random moments a week for a month. The answer is usually parts, waiting, and looking for information, in that order, and it is rarely what management expected.

Six changes that recover capacity

• •Kit the parts for scheduled jobs the day before, so nobody walks to stores mid-job
• •Group everything due on a vehicle into one visit, so it comes off the road once
• •Put the schedule, history and manual on the vehicle record, reachable by scanning a code
• •Let drivers report defects with a photograph, so the shop knows what is coming
• •Stop scheduling work that is not ready, which loses a morning every time
• •Move the paperwork to the phone at the vehicle, rather than a terminal at the end of the day

Outsource the routine, keep the diagnostic

When capacity is the constraint, send out the work that is predictable and low skill: tyres, basic servicing, cosmetic repairs. Keep diagnostic and complex work in house, because that is where your people’s knowledge of your fleet is worth the most and where an outside garage is slowest.

Keep the people you have

The cheapest technician is the one who does not leave. Tooling that works, a shop that is warm, a schedule that is not permanently in crisis, and being asked before decisions that affect the work. None of these are new and all of them are cheaper than recruiting.

Grow your own, and start earlier than feels comfortable

Apprenticeships take years to pay back, which is exactly why fleets keep postponing them. The fleets that are not short in five years are the ones that started three years ago.