Are you measuring technician capacity in your service department? If you aren’t you should be! With many dealerships facing sales headwinds, Fixed Ops profitability is expected to largely offset those declines. The first step in picking up sales department slack is being able to accurately measure and forecast your technician capacity in order to fully maximize revenue.
Technician Capacity Management Helps Ease Staffing Strains
Time is a precious commodity. The first step in tackling the tech shortage is making the most out of the staff you currently have in your shop. There are three different areas to examine when optimizing your existing technicians. First, looking at the different types of technician times, then measuring productivity, and finally understanding and predicting technician capacity.
The capacity of your existing technicians is a constraint to revenue and the volume of work able to be performed. The best place to start is to develop a plan that provides sufficient capacity to enable desired revenue as the year progresses. Capacity is best determined using a “bottom up” strategy focusing on individual recent prior performance technician by a technician.
Developing a technician capacity forecast requires a deep dive into the recent performance (over the last 60-90 days) of your technicians to determine the following: work mix, labor sales, ELR, technician pay rate, gross profit per hour, parts sales, and more. This information establishes the baseline needed to create the forecast. It is important to note that Tech performance can vary dramatically based on work-mix and hours scheduled.
Technician Capacity Management is Necessary to Grow Revenue
Technician capacity is the biggest constraint to revenue achievement. You can’t plan to have more customers, more hours, and more parts sales without the capacity to support that. In order to leverage tech capacity to grow your revenue, you need to develop a plan that provides sufficient capacity to support revenue goals as the year progresses. A capacity forecast should be built “bottom up”, technician by technician based on individual performance. By leveraging real time data to track and compare forecasted plans vs actuals you’ll be able to understand gaps and make updates.
Introducing Dynatron Software’s Newest Technician Capacity Management Tool: TechCF
A notable pain point for many Service Managers is having access to the tools needed to accurately model current technician capacity, possible future capacity, and understand how it affects current and future revenue and profit. Converting executive revenue goals for the Service Department into an actual management plan for achieving those goals has always been time consuming, difficult, and inaccurate, until now!
With Dynatron Software’s latest Tech CF application, we make it easy to set up a month-to-month forecast to turn revenue goals into a department level roadmap for success.
Why TechCF?
Tracking individual technicians and their performance is now easier than ever. Our tool allows you to add or remove technicians and see their forecast impacts in real time while also being able to analyze CP, warranty, and internal ELR increase.
TechCF saves your Service Managers time by requiring minimal data inputs and providing numerous data outputs to get an overall department & detailed technician level views.
Measure Technician Capacity with Dynatron Software
It’s time to ditch the spreadsheets! TechCF will help you manage technician capacity and develop accurate forecasts within your Service Department. For more information and help getting setup, reach out to us today.