DealersEdge Professional Forums

Quesion for the GM Service Managers out there or anyone else who might know.

In GM,s P&P manual they require tech. time logs showing date and time spent on all repair orders including Cust. pay and internal not to mention warranty ro's. I have been in GM dealerships for a very long time (over 30 years) and they have never looked at this unless the tech was looking for OLH on a repair. Now it seems to be a main focus.

My question, is this being pushed for dealers all over the country or are they just focusing on the dealers here in Florida, what is your experiance on this right now?

There seems to be a lot of audit staff activity here in Florida lately including dealers that have their expense in line and the intimation I got from another manager was the increased audit activity and compliance requirements is focusing on dealers who are getting paid retail for waranty repairs.

I dont know about GM but anytime the manufacturers conduct an audit, they typically require to see entire flagsheet or electronic time card. They need to see the chronological order of the techncicians day, in other words, they look for double punches. This is pretty typical of any make. It may be a weakness that they are focusing in on... but it was probably always on the p & p manual. It is imperative for management to ensure-clock in 1 ro and one job at a time, which , in theory, is all a tech can work on anyway.

In Ohio time clocks has been a major subject brought up a lot recently.

This has come up during the last two DMA visits. Frankly we don't know how to comply with the request. Our DMA doesn't know how to meet the requirements set forth by the regional office. We are in the North Central Region and this is what we are supposed to have ready for inspection at ANY time.

1 - The time tickets (stickers) must be stamped by a time clock. Time stamping the repair order is not acceptable.

2 - Every minute the technician is working MUST be accounted for on the time tickets.

3 - Item #2 means that the technician must clock in on a time ticket when he arrives at work. If he doesn't have a vehicle right away he still must clock in as "idle time." When he is issued a vehicle he clocks off "idle time" and clocks on the vehicle. Any time he doesn't have a vehicle he must clock as "idle."

4 - I informed our DMA this is impossible. Techs don't possess their time tickets so they can't easily clock on and off - on their time tickets. They do possess the repair order but that won't work.

Apparently several dealer service managers have expressed concern over complying with this procedure. Specifically how to accomplish compliance with a fully manual system. We don't have dispatching or terminals at the techs toolbox. Each tech does have their own computer at their toolbox but we don't have any automated software that will facilitate this function. Purchase of such software is very expensive, as is the "seat" licenses to our DMS.

Those of you that do comply how are you doing so?

Im confused why you cant comply... do you not have a time clock? how do hourly people clock into work? If not, do your techs run their time electronically in the dms?

after re- reading your post it sounds like you just have to have a flag sheet and have them clock in and out on the flag sheet and not the repair order. should be pretty straightforward.

One of our problems is the technicians do not have their time sheets, the service advisor keeps them as he is the person who "flags" the RO. We are a small shop and the advisor is already overworked. The time clock is in the shop not close to the advisor. Our main issue is the clocking of idle time. This could create a monster list of time sheets. And we have been warned by our DMA that if more than a minute or two is unaccounted for then the entire weeks worth of time will be excluded. Any OLH would be charged back.

I understand the need to police problem dealerships. However, it would be nice to be on a honor system where if we clock on and off and show the OLH separately we should be allowed to continue as is. If a problem arises THEN implement this type of tracking program.

I have to believe MOST dealers are not crooks. If they were they wouldn't survive long.

Our DMA has been in pushing this a lot lately too. We avoid OLH at all costs to avoid throwing up any red flags. We have the exact same issue, Whiner. Time clock is in the shop (which is in a separate building than the service drive) and service advisors handle the flag sheets on the drive. What a pain....

What if you had the tech keep the flag sheet to track time and have the advisor use a blank one with techs name on it to flag his hours. Then at end of day, both flags are attached so that management can cross check both flagsheets. The tracking of an employees time( tech flag sheet) is critical. I just had to reprogram my time clocks today for all employees so that they now get paid by the minute. so if they start at 8:00 am and they clock in at 7:58 , we had a six minute window to start paying employee at 8:00am now it starts at 7:58. This is a growing nightmare and its only getting worse. The other enforcement issue is lunches before 5 hour mark for fulltime employees. I now shut the shop down at 12-1230- to make sure all employees get lunch before 5th hour of work. fun fun fun

The GM Technician accounting of labour time requirement is for all Dealers as of March 2014. We met with our DMA about it in April. Putting this process in place is slowwing production down in our shop this week. If you look at the P&P section 1.6.2.11 page 3 there is a way to do this from a flag sheet if you do not want to do it through your DMS. Just remember the technician's punch time on repair orders/job cards for the day must be consistant with their work time on the Dealership time clock. When they clock out for lunch they can't be clocked in on a repair order/job card. Chrysler began doing this in 2013 or earlier. A friend forwarded me their P&P to compare to GMs. I'm trying to get more information to get this process implemented smoothly in our Service Department. Are technicians are accustomed to storying their tickets, but they have not been clocking in and out or putting themselves on breaks during the work day. Hopefully there won't be an audit before we get everything worked out! Any advice or help from ADP users would be greatly appreciated!