SHIFT SCHEDULING

[Fixedopsmgr]

WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A NEW FACILITY AND WILL BE INCREASING OUR HOURS OF OPERATION. I AM INTERESTED IN FINDING OUT HOW ANYONE WITH EXTENDED HOURS HANDLES THEIR PERSONELL SCHEDULES. WE WILL BE OPEN 7AM TO 8PM FOUR NIGHTS A WEEK (M-T). FRIDAYS TILL 5 AND SATURDAYS 7-3. WE WILL HAVE APPROX. 12 TECHS TO SCHEDULE. IF ANYONE HAS A SIMILAR SCHEDULE AND WORKS IN SHIFTS FOR TECHS/ADVISORS/LOT ATT. I WOULD APPRECIATE ANY RESPONSES.
THANKS

[kpratt]

Wow, your question couldn't have come at a better time...I was just getting ready to ask pretty much the same question...We have 27 techs, 5 1/2 advisors, 5 counterpeople and we are looking at trying to set up 4/40 or 3/13 with hours of operation from 6am to
12 midnight weekdays and 8 to 4 Saturdays. We have real issues in our ability to get customers in without a wait of 3 weeks, sometimes more if they want a loaner car. This just doesn't work for customers who need quick service, LOF and the like. And yes, we are only 9 years old; have had several service and parts managers and don't have strong processes in place. The tail wags the dog so to speak. I am the parts manager and believe that the current management team can make the necessary changes and turn the store around. We have very low CSI. The owner has more or less given me the ball to run with after almost hiring a parts and service director.
Thanks for you help

[smr3998]

We moved to a new building as you are going to do. What we did in the shop was kept the technician's original schedules as they were (8 am. - 5:30 pm.), but staggered service advisors around to cover the fringe hours. The key is to leave shop doors open and the lights on during these hours as it invites customers in (i.e. your techs don't have to be there at 7 pm. when a customer drops off their vehicle). We run 12 techs by the way, too.

[mjb]

I think that before you should consider ext hrs. you should first decide how effecient you are durring normal hrs. benchmarks I like to use are 45 hr per tech avg weekly and working apporx 100 ro,s per month. If you are not at these figures or worse if you don't know what yours are this would be a good time to start keeping track.
The biggest expense on most statements is personel ,especially the non-prod people which is necessary to hire more of to keep longer hours.Also management gets harder as most techs don't want another tech working in thier stall or having to finish a task another started. As you can tell we abandoned the ext. hours and focused on everything we could to expedite repairs and keep techs working.
Some of the things that helped us was changing pay plans to match what we wanted employees to accomplish,such putting disp on commission per hrs run in shop, warranty clerk is on comm. for dollars collected. We went elect. ro system and use porters to run parts to techs when they're avail. All one line ro's are entered as waiters for 2 reasons it gets cars off the lot faster to make room cutting down on lot damage and you make lots of easy money and happy customers and another plus is you don't need as many rentals. We created a seperate dept. for vehicles that come in with no start conditions as these can usually be repaired quickly and generally end up being 1 line repairs anyway.
I help run our shop this way with 20 techs and 4 advisors and we have high CSI scores and low cost per vin compared to our peers and manage to stay in the black.