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
Profits: Not A 4-Letter Word -You Can Only Learn Lean By Doing.
Speed Is the Key When attempting to create a continuous flow between all the steps in your process, the areas where work doesn’t flow at the pace the customer is pulling will become obvious, forcing you to correct them immediately. by John Sweigart It has always been — and continues to be — difficult explaining
What’s the Goal of any Business? To Make Money
I’ll add a couple of caveats to that.
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.
Standard Operating Procedures – Working Smarter, Not Harder
Maximize productivity by standardizing “best practices” across your organization. “Since we started truly implementing standard operating procedures, it’s a statistical fact that I only spend two hours a week in three locations and that we grew from five employees to 50 in a four-year time period,” says Troy Gates, owner of a three-shop operation called Gates
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.
Lowering Your Overhead
Earning money is one thing. Keeping it is another. You’d be surprised what shops can do to reduce overhead besides raising door rates