Manual collection of workshop times from technicians has proved to be deeply flawed, with up to 40% of times not correctly recorded, or even lost altogether.
Think of your workforce as a commodity, you're purchasing or paying eight hours of labour a day, regardless of whether your selling or using it internally. Therefore, you need to maximise your return on the eight hours you've bought.
Assetminder is a powerful tool that can improve your operation by streamlining the process of job creation, assignment and tracking.
Let’s look at how this time can be lost and the solutions to help fix the problem.
Poor planning has technicians wandering the floor at the beginning of the day, while your on the phone, resulting in time lost out of their eight hour shift. With forward planning your maintenance team would clearly know their allocated tasks at the beginning of their shift, allowing them to start work immediately without unnecessary delays.
Additionally Assetminder provides real-time updates and notifications, thus updating technicians of any changes or updates to the jobs they have been assigned.
Workshop Planning, "I know what your going to say", we can’t plan due to the amount of unscheduled jobs we have to process, I simply don’t have time to plan or it won’t work for us
Start with the basics. At a very minimum get your planner set up with job cards, assign a timeline and what technician is best suited to individual jobs. Ensuring everyone knows their assigned jobs for the day will increases productivity and reduce possible down-time.
Now at least your techs know what job to clock on to, from the start of the working day.
I hear it all the time “ we can’t ask our staff to clock on and off jobs, that would make them feel like we’re watching them”
Remember what I said, it’s your commodity, you wouldn’t purchase 8 oil filters and give half of them away for free, so why should it be any different with workshop times!
Effective Real Time Clocking onto job cards is the best way to maximise your return on labour. Therefore, while your still on that phone call at the beginning of a shift, you can still observe workshop activities with a labour dashboard.
This Real Time Reporting Tool tells you who is actively clocked on jobs, other duties or not clocked on at all. This creates an opportunity to plug another hole in your labour slippage.
The returns are significant and can make the difference between profit and loss in a commercial workshop.
Six technicians working an eight hour shift, each one loses 30 minutes a day through poor time management. You bill out your time at €50 per hour, so that’s €25 lost on each tech.
€25 x 6 techs = €150 x 5 days a week = €750. This adds up to nearly €40k per annum, not a small amount of money, and this is only calculating 30 minutes a day lost on poor time management.
Remember this commodity is not like your oil filters, once the time is lost it’s gone!
This is probably the most overlooked rule that should be enforced, as it could be worth thousands in lost revenue.
We’ve all been there, a wagon arrives at the workshop, bypassing the supervisor, the driver asks the technician to fix an air leak for example. The repair is done with no job card, just a reminder written on piece of cardboard, which gets mislaid, resulting in lost labour, lost parts and possible non compliance for not recording the defect.
We’ve all experienced it: Billy is working next to Ted and requests some quick assistance, things go pear shaped on Billy's job, resulting in the Job Ted is working on racking up incorrect times. Nothing is said, so the the extra labour time that can be potentially charged to Billy's job is lost and the job Ted's working on, has the potential to be overcharged.
Asking the technicians to provide feedback regarding jobs is crucial. This allows billing extra labour to jobs with the confidence your can stand over, making it a lot easier to get the invoice passed.