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What is an acceptable number of advisors in a shop with 10 techs? My Service Department is a GM/import store (Olds Buick GMC and Hyundai) with 8 journeymen, 2 mid level apprentices, with a dispatcher. Number of RO's per day is usually about 40,(seperate Ro's for warrantee and CP).During the slow winter season we usually do about 800-900 RO's per month. More in summer. We have a Warrantee administrator to code the warrantee RO's. We have 2 writers and a service receptionist. The 2 writers are (I feel) overworked and don't have enough time to do any upsell or research on vehicle history or recommended services. Any thoughts?

When deciding whether I think the advisors are over-worked I calculate the numbers backwards. So it's different for every shop, but let's take an average store.

Techs are 125% efficient
The average R.O. contains 2.5 hours

So for a 8 hour day each tech needs 4 R.O.'s to maintain their performance (2.5 hours x 4 = 10 hours). I think that the average advisor should write 18-22 R.O.s a day, so for this example the ratio would be 5 techs to every advisor.

I think there is some give in that system, like if the advisors are averaging 3.3 hours per R.O. due to time spent upsell we could back down the daily number written from 4 to 3.

Given the way you separate R.O.s (WTY vs CP) then I think that maybe you're staffed at a normal level and you should look towards redelegating some of the activies that the advisors are doing. I don't know your situation, but let's say that the advisors are also acting as shop foremans and doing some quality type of control or fielding technical questions. I think you'd be better off assigning a tech as "Lead Tech" and pay them a few bucks to handle this load instead of bringing on a new advisor's salary.

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** Rob, Editor WD&S **
Help is only a message post away!
robc@dealersedge.com

[This message has been edited by robc (edited 03-07-2001).]

It sounds like we are the same size. I have the same number of techs and advisors in a stand alown Buick store. We handle 50 to 75 ros per day and with a dispatcher it was not a good deal (nothing got done). I did change to a lateral support system and split the shop. It realy turned things around and the store started to do well in service.
This is a simple thing to do that will save you overhead and make the work flow much better.
e-mail me if you have any questions
danh04@hotmail.com

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I run a 12 man ford store.We use a simple support group system.You can find out more info if you read "the 7 controllables of service dept profitability" by Ron Stoner.
In a nut shell simple support is 1 service advisor writes and closes the repair orders for 3 or 4 techs ,which are his team.The dispatcher is no more or turned into an advisor.And the final is to hire an appt co-ordinator to book each teams work seperatly and by job skill.
we have changed to this 5 months ago and I must say after the first month I had to find things to do.Your people become more accountable.CSI goes up and Profitablilty jumps more as well.

If your interested you can email me at cspanier@whitehorsemotors.com

I think that Chris S. makes a good point. your store is small enough that your advisors can probably manage their groups of technicians more efficiently than your dispatcher. This frees up your dispatcher to act as advisor or in another capacity.

As for the tech to advisor ratio,I have found that 4-5 techs per advisor seems to work best and generate suffient revenues to cover their overhead.

We tried just about every method there is. We had the service advisors at one time dispatching as well as writting up customers, but thats kind of hard in a 15 tech shop. Right now we have 15 techs, 3 service advisors, 1 shop foreman, a central dispatcher, and an appointment coordinator. This system seems to be working ok at this time. We write about 60 to 70 cars a day and in the summer it can get as high as 90 cars. we also plan on adding one more advisor. I feel the advisors shoul only write 20 to 25 cars a day if that. This way they can spend time with customers.
L.DeSousa

We are a lateral support system with 32 techs and 10 advisors on 2 separate shifts. I keep my advisors between 500 and 600 flat rate hours per month. We do not have a dispatcher or billers the advisors do it all and this works extremely well