A Productivity Snapshot

Lately I’ve been having more conversations with repairers about productivity because some believe they have made gigantic leaps forward in making their businesses more productive. The increased focus on the production floor, triggered by the industry’s adoption of lean methodologies, no doubt has had an influence, or has it? I decided to take a quick look into our data to see if I could spot any trends.

How do you best measure productivity? I’ve used our units per day metric, or touch time as it is also known. In this scenario, productivity measures how many hours on average are spent working on each repair, everyday it is on site (Total Hrs / number of days = Units / Day). I choose this measurement for two reasons:

1. in order to increase your units per day performance, you must also improve a lot of other shop processes that impact this productivity KPI such as estimating, parts management and scheduling, and,
2. there is an increased focus by insurers to monitor units per day performance.

As discussed in a prior article, I believe this is one of the KPI’s a shop should track for its own business. If insurance partners are also tracking the KPI, it just means that you should be able to be proactive rather than reactive with those conversations.

The data we collected includes both customer and insurance pay repairs, and is provided only to see if the trend line has moved. In future reports, we may dig deeper and get the statistical validation required to make a definitive statement. During a three year period, this is what we found:

From what we see, there is support for the assumption that productivity has improved, but what are the factors that contributed to those gains? I’ll take a stab and make some assumptions (if they are proven wrong at a future date, I guess I’ll only have myself to blame):

• Lean initiatives and renewed interest in production processes have contributed to the overall increase
• Some insurers (unfortunately, only some), are adopting a lean mentality to cut out administrative waste that slows repairs
• The top performing repairers are bootstrapping the overall average higher. I know we have some clients with averages much higher than shown, even with customer pay repairs in the average

I am interested to see what further analysis would provide. What are the average units per day of the top 10% of performers? If you segment insurer and customer pay, what are the respective averages? Does the average vary from one geographic region to another? Please let us know what you think, or what you would potentially like to see, and we may be able to include it in future articles.

My final assumption is that the repairers who figure out how to continually increase productivity will be the winners … not just for their insurance partners, but also for their business. I don’t think I will need to eat any crow on that one!