John Sweigart, Author at BodyShop Business - Page 3 of 3
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Standard Procedures: A Tool for Improvement

In lean organizations, standard work is used to support the objective — continual improvement. If you’re ever going to get any better, you must start with a standard way. It’s the baseline for improving your results

Re-Thinking the Shop Manager Role

In ‘lean’ organizations, the process itself is the ‘manager,’ freeing up your actual shop manager to be a leader instead — someone focused not on problem solving and putting out fires, but on building a better business.

The Process of Efficiency

Our industry has focused on gross profit issues for far too long. The key to success lies in the way we work, not in what someone else is doing to us. It’s time we shift our focus to ‘fixed’ costs — repairing more cars with the same ‘fixed’ cost or repairing the same amount of cars with a lower ‘fixed’ cost.

Seeing the Big Picture

You can’t improve individual pieces of your business and expect overall improvement. Instead, you must examine the relationship between all the steps and begin to incrementally improve problem areas.

Kaizen Part II: Pulling the Value from Waste

Simply put, the objective of a lean business is to continually identify and eliminate waste. As waste is eliminated, more value is produced, which means a more efficient model.

Kaizen: Break to Make Better

To get you started creating a “lean” organization, we’ll focus on “point” kaizen – looking at a single process inside your business and rebuilding it.

Building a Business vs. Building a Car

Employees inside a truly “lean” enterprise don’t consider themselves production workers. They’re problem solvers. The reason they get paid each day isn’t to perform a specific task, but to improve a specific process. Every small business owner or top-level manager out there shows up to work every day focused on getting the job done. You’d

What’s the Goal of any Business? To Make Money

I’ll add a couple of caveats to that.

Repairing Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Question answered by: Mike West Recently, the Sierra Club — the environmental organization that acts as the world’s conscience when it comes to issues like protecting the spotted owl, old growth forests and, of course, global warming — weighed in with a press release titled, “The Next Big Thing From Detroit.” No, it wasn’t about

Waste Not, Want Not: Eliminate “Waste” in the Business

The overall objective of a process-centered enterprise is to eliminate “waste” in the business. In doing so, you can more effectively deliver what customers want — and reduce your costs.

The Efficiency Myth

Everything you’ve ever learned about efficiency is wrong. Individual efficiencies don’t
matter one bit. It’s the overall process — the process efficiency — that we need to
focus on.

Better, Cheaper, Faster …

Vehicle owners and insurers want all three. You can fight these shifts in the market, attempt litigation, kick, scream and even call your congressman. But at the end of the day, you either give customers what they want — or someone else will.