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TIME IS M O N E Y. The idiom is as fundamental in the quick lube world as the oil itself. Optimize bay time and you can increase car counts. Increase car counts and, well, youâll be doing just fine in this business. But the constraints of space and time have their limits. Oil must be drained. Services must be checked and double checked for quality. On a good day, cars must wait in line. At a certain point, time dictates another part of the business: capacity. Sure, operators would love to have exponentially larger car counts. But customers donât see it that way, particularly if thereâs always a line to slog through. âWhatâs your point where the customer says, âI just canât wait longer than 30 minutes?ââ says Michael Meuret, co-owner of the Einsteinâs Oilery network in Idaho. Operators have variables with which to play. Adding labor can help with speed or overcrowd a bay. Adding a shop is an expensive proposition. How can those forces be balanced? Meuret and his team have considered these questions and have a case study in capacity management.
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The Challenge Think of the most steady times of the week at your shop. Itâs probably between Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. or sometime nearby. How long is the average customer waiting? One challenge is always to get a quicker experience for the customer without sacrificing quality. But thatâs just scratching the surface. More specific to your operation, the real challenge here is how you can manipulate your variables to gain speed. âIn those times, if you canât move those cars or keep them under a half hour wait, youâre probably going to get to a point where youâve got to do something differently,â Meuret says. You can shift staff or add staff. Add a bay or add another location. Improve your process to reduce service time. Each shop has its own variables, and Meuret says there are a few things to consider. The Solutions Labor Up Meuret says that some operators might look at him sideways when he schedules at least a dozen people for a busy
two-bay shop. Thatâs two pit techs for each car, two hood techs for each bay, two running customer contact in the line and two more doing courtesy services in that queue. âOn a busy day, we bring enough personnel and do enough things in advance as far as queuing the car that once youâre on bay, itâs five minutes,â Meuret says. âThe customer doesnât feel that they got any less because they were receiving all the attention in between while theyâre waiting.â
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