Cycle Time Bandits

Where are the cycle time bandits in your business?  This key question becomes the starting point for streamlining your business and increasing profits.

Before you can accurately locate these profit stealing activities in your shop, you must first understand what you are measuring.  Here is a key point.  There are two timelines that we concern ourselves with.  One is the time we spend working on the vehicle, which is labor time, not cycle time. The other timeline is how long a vehicle resides in your care before being returned to the customer.  This is the timeline that is important, because it is the cycle time of the repair.  It is the time the vehicle spends doing something, or waiting on something, that is important.

For example, if you have to spend an extra 30 minutes of time on a vehicle that saves a day of vehicle cycle time, it is the day of cycle time savings that is important.  The 30 minutes can be billed as labor, but does not contribute to the vehicles cycle time.

In the language of Lean, we call this the value stream.  The value stream is made up of value added and non-value added steps.  Basically, value added steps are those things the customer doesn’t mind paying for; non-value added steps are those things that they do not want to pay for.  For example, the insurance company would be happy to pay a half hour of labor that cuts a day of cycle time from the repair.  They are not happy about paying for the rental car charges for an extra day while the vehicle waits for some sort of service.

One last note; when considering cycle time, a return of the vehicle to the shop due to some repair problem, adds to cycle time. Everybody loses in this situation.  You need to evaluate every comeback and eliminate its root cause.