5 Best Practices for Your Dealership’s Documentation of Service Procedures
“Why is this costing me so much money? It appears to need little effort. How often have customers told you this, prompting you to reconsider your original estimate?
You can prevent this kind of problem with a robust technician work order recording process.
Documentation for services or work orders contains all the details about a task and the actions necessary to fulfill it.
Maintaining accurate service records not only demonstrates value to the customer but also enables everyone in your dealership to keep track of work orders.
The technicians are able to more clearly understand their roles and priorities, and you are able to assess how their time is spent while ensuring that the most revenue-generating hours are billed.
Additionally, service records can boost technicians’ productivity and efficiency.
After all, document issues account for approximately 21% of daily productivity loss, and this approach can assist you in overcoming that.
Let’s look at five best practices for service process documentation to increase shop productivity.
1. Hold frequent gatherings
Documentation is a vital habit, but your technicians can only profit from it if they are regular and consistent with it.
Getting technicians’ support for work order documentation is the first step. It is intended to convey the value of keeping shop records current as well as best practices for doing so.
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that increased collaboration and communication might increase employee productivity by 25%.
Because of this, it’s crucial to include service documentation in your daily or weekly meetings when technicians go over their individual job orders and the procedures they followed.
Tell them at this time that efficiency is not about doing chores as soon as you can. It’s about doing their jobs well and delivering excellent outcomes.
Find productivity leaks.
The whole picture must be painted in the service documentation. For instance, this step needs to be recorded if a professional spends an additional hour heating and removing a rusted bolt.
Similar obstacles that could cause production leakage will inevitably be encountered by technicians. Finding these leaks and talking about potential solutions to the issue is crucial.
It could be a good idea to invest in service scheduling software that enables you to swiftly and effectively schedule, prioritize, and track work orders if you struggle to hold your technicians accountable for the jobs they do.
A culture of continuous improvement is created by addressing bottlenecks, identifying solutions, and recording them, which helps to make a dealership more profitable.
3. Keep track of the work and time spent.
One of the best pieces of advice for service documentation is, “It’s not how much you write, but what you write that matters.”
Teach technicians to be specific in their work documentation. Let’s say that fixing braking systems is part of the work order. This would involve activities like checking the brakes, removing the wheels, removing the brake calipers, changing the brake pads, etc.
Each activity the technician completes must be included in the service documentation, along with the precise amount of time it took.
This makes it possible for fair and consistent billing because you can know from one glance at the document how much time was spent on each activity.
4. Include important stakeholders.
Do you frequently find yourself making decisions and informing your supervisors and technicians of changes? You ought to consider changing that.
According to the leading management consulting firm Kepner-Tregoe, “There are crucial stakeholders that should be consulted in decision-making when making an important or complex business choice.
They ought to comprise a select group of people who are qualified because they are aware of the decision’s related business concerns and outcomes, care about them, or have the power to influence them. They care about the outcome or are aware of the demands and difficulties in the business world.
They should also include important figures who can help the implementation succeed.
Key stakeholders in the case of dealerships are your managers, the shop foreman, and the service administrators. Consider their suggestions for enhancing service documentation and plugging productivity gaps to increase efficiency.
5. Specify goals.
Setting goals enhances performance and productivity by 11% to 25%, according to research by Latham & Locke.
Small agriculture dealerships will have significantly different productivity objectives than large material-handling dealerships. Set objectives that are in line with your sector, the organization’s size, the team’s make-up, and the performance of other dealerships.
Finally, these objectives must be SMART:
Be specific about what you intend to achieve.
How will you evaluate success if it is measurable?
How will you accomplish the objective?
Relevant: How does it affect your company?
Timely: How long will it take you to complete the task?
To gauge progress and monitor employee productivity, define targets that can be compared to shop documentation.
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