Episode Transcript
*This transcript was generated using Artificial Intelligence. Errors may occur. If you notice an error, please contact [email protected].
Tom Dorsey (00:06):
Good morning and good afternoon. Welcome to this week’s edition of The Digital Shop Talk Radio. I’m Tom Dorsey, and today we’re going to be talking with our expert panel of experts are so far one of them waiting on Uwe Kleinschmidt still. And I see a couple, I see the remaining expert panel of experts in the audience, and I might be promoting them to panelists here. It depends on how we get scrapping. So today we’ve got a great show for you. We’re doing an in-depth kind of deep dive backed by popular demand. Quite a few folks have been asking for a follow-up to the episode we did. So today, the business control panel, an easy button for your shop. And what we’re going to be doing is going, how do we read, interpret, dive deep into that BCP data to find opportunities for improvement as Bill likes to call it for our shop. So welcome back to the show. It’s been a while, Bill Connor.
Bill Connor (01:04):
Thank you, sir. I’ve been kind of on a digital safari, so I am back from safari, I hope.
Tom Dorsey (01:12):
Good, good, good. Well, I see you look well rested in tanned, by the way. Very tanned.
Bill Connor (01:17):
It’s a color correction
Tom Dorsey (01:19):
In a fancy new office before we had you on, we were out in the wilderness somewhere out in a prairie. Now it’s good to see you back in civilization, buddy. And we’re waiting on Uwe, but we’re not going to wait too long. So I just sent him a link, he’ll be joining us. But what we’re going to do is Bill’s going to kick us off and we’re going to give you kind of a, we want some audience participation here. What we’re going to do is we’re going to show you a scenario, typical scenario from a business control panel, and we’re going to ask you to put on your Sherlock home hat and chat in what your determination or your interpretation of that data is. And then we’re going to drill down and find out, A, are you right? And B, how do we get to that root cause?
(02:03):
Because here’s the thing, once we get down to that root cause, the next step or the corrective action becomes pretty obvious. Now whether you want to actually implement that corrective action or not, that’s up to you. But you will know what you should do to improve that metric or to improve that performance. So before we get started, the next thing we want to do is don’t be shy. If you’ve got some challenges in your shop, you’ve been working in your business control panel, you don’t get something, or even better, you want to challenge us, you want to embarrass Bill live on the air and tell us that we’re full of the beans. Throw down, put it in the chat and we’ll dissect that live on the air. And I can hear already John Long’s fingers just pounding away on that keyboard all the way from Texas. I feel like I’m at the warmup session for the clock dancing Olympics.
Bill Connor (03:04):
So while we’re waiting for Uwe, why don’t we go ahead and get them into diagnostic mindset. If you’re working on a vehicle and you’re shopping and had a performance problem, you’d use some data to go ahead and understand what’s going on. And if you want to get some extra output out of that vehicle, you’re going to look at certain data KPIs on a vehicle. But in our case, we’re going to be looking at KPIs on the business control panel. So just like diagnosing your shop, we’ve got inputs and we’ve got outputs and so on. So I’d like you to go ahead and start thinking in that particular mindset, and if anybody disagrees with me that they can go ahead and diagnose the performance of their shop, perform an experiment on their shop just like you would on a vehicle in your shop, please go ahead and chat in and let me know that I’m off on that mindset. But again, everybody in this call and probably in the industry, you’re used to diagnosing vehicle performance problem with data. So can you do it with the business control panel? That’s what I’d like you to go ahead and start thinking about.
Tom Dorsey (04:05):
And just remember, Bill is ninja level when it comes to the business control panel and as John Long says, challenge accepted. So we look forward to a lively discussion. Well without further ado, Bill, why don’t you kick that ball.
Bill Connor (04:21):
So I think what I’d like to do is just pull up a group of different shops on a business control panel and just go through some of my favorite KPIs, if that’s okay with you. Perhaps even if it’s not okay with you,
Tom Dorsey (04:33):
What you asking me for?
Bill Connor (04:36):
So first of all, let’s make sure you can see my screen.
Tom Dorsey (04:40):
Yes.
Bill Connor (04:41):
Now lemme how
Tom Dorsey (04:41):
Does it look for everybody? If you could chat in for me, it looks full, right? But last week, I think it was last week’s episode, people were saying that the screen looks small. So if you could chat in and let me know. Does the screen look? Yep, we’re good to go. Thanks Michael.
Bill Connor (04:55):
Awesome. So basically I’ve got five different shops laid across here and when I talk about diagnosing, I’m always talking about inputs and outputs and so on. But these are some basic outputs that I want. I want to go ahead and drive weekly revenue and I want to drive ARO and then I want to go ahead and do that by measuring certain inputs. So inspection rate to me is a key. Input edited pictures is a key input and then we can go right down the list. Average number of pictures taken, inspection sent modus research time. And one of my favorite ones on here that I like to do is use as we go down this long list is service advisor efficiency. And so a lot of people say that it’s great to go ahead and know how many hours per day on an average the service writer actually invoices, but to me I’m looking more about keeping the technicians fat and happy.
(05:49):
So I want to go ahead and look at the technicians and see on average how many hours per day are they paid posting invoices across the time period I’m on. So this is one of my favorite ones. And to me this is an output. A lot of other things have to go right to drive this number, but again, to me it’s just another diagnostic data pit that I use. And I see Uwe went ahead and joined us. So if you want to go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, I’d sure be open to discussion.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (06:20):
How can you be wrong?
Bill Connor (06:23):
I’m a product of the industry. I’m an anarchist just like the other ones you talked about.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (06:30):
Can you go back to what you just showed because I really want to make sure we all know what that means. So you see in the service advisor efficiency also the tax listed and that basically means how many billable hours have all service advisors assigned to those techs and finished, correct?
Bill Connor (07:06):
Yep. And so how I like to use this is if I’m looking at a shop in they’re open a five day a week shop in their averaging eight or 10 hours a day, that’s pretty damn good because those techs are going ahead and doing over eight or 10 hours a day. So it really depends on the timeframe. But again, as you get used to looking at this, if we can start driving them techs up, and I like to use this also, everybody complains about I don’t have enough damn technicians, I can’t find ’em and so on. And so to me the solution to going ahead and technician shortage is to go ahead and make the technicians that you have extremely profitable for themself in the shop by actually dispatching getting ’em the right type of jobs and actually measuring their performance. So again, a lot of shops when they complain about a technician shortage, they may have more of a shortage of process than they do actually a shortage of skilled staff members.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (07:58):
This is a good point. I mean just go for three columns to the right and those techs are happy, at least the first two
Bill Connor (08:08):
Fat and happy
Tom Dorsey (08:09):
Technic, it’s like throw back to the show a couple of weeks back with Dennis Eidson on, right? Right. When you boil it all down, it might just be a guy who’s not going to do much more than 20, 25 hours a week and then that’s another decision you need to make.
Bill Connor (08:25):
In his case, it’s a definite decision because he’s only got six parking spots to work with. You got to go ahead and be very efficient. And again, another one that I like to look at is average hours per repair order for the technicians. So if we go up here and we get into the average hours per ARO for the technicians and they’re not three hours plus them guys are wearing out sneakers going back and forth to the parking lot and they’re wearing out their back bending over racking, racking cars and they get a little miserable and a little grumpy and you hear people joke about all the time, the difference between a technician is a puppy, at least the puppy’s eventually stop whining, but again, they’re entitled to it if they’re going ahead and not using processes that are actually wearing them out, wearing the employees out and wearing your equipment out.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (09:17):
So I don’t know where you want to take us, but can you maybe give us the top three things to get Gene to where Ronnie is?
Bill Connor (09:31):
So the things I want to go and look at is first of all, are they doing inspections? But more importantly when they do inspections, are they spotting needs? So when I talk about spotting needs, that’s the average number of recommendations per inspection. And so if the technicians aren’t spotting needs, they’re not bought in the program. And when I say spotting needs, I’m talking about immediate needs today and also the needs for the next service visit because every vehicle has been dying since it’s been born. So if you’re showing the customer what needs to be done on the next service visit, you’re doing one of two things, you’re giving them the opportunity to do it today, which is a really good thing in today’s climate because they might not have to go and get out of their car and disinfect it and redo that again. So they might go ahead and decide to do it all in one trip, but there’s no vehicle that should ever leave your shop without a next service due.
(10:26):
But again, the number of recommendations is key. And then from there, if I go ahead and look and see that are they taking the right type of pictures and helping the service writer prepare them to go ahead and present ’em to the customer? So when I go ahead and let’s see where I’ve got it on my long list here, I’m looking for the edited pictures percentage, which should be, let’s move up a little bit higher edited pictures percentage should be right here. So when I look at this, not only are the technicians taking pictures, but are they helping the service writer out by having an error or a note on them and then is the service writer doing something with them? So those are some things that technician can do to stack the odds in their favor, do a good inspection, make sure they put some righteous recommendations on ’em, and then if they give the service writer the pictures and the notes that go with them, then the service writer job is really kind of easy. Alls they have to do is approve it, estimate it and everything that’s been righteously documented by that technician. The service writer really shouldn’t have any excuse at all not to estimate it and present it to the customer and let the customer say yes or no.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (11:41):
So here’s what I’m spotting and I want to challenge you a little bit. If you look at the edited pictures per inspection of the first shop and the fourth, they’re pretty aligned and I happen to know they use guided, the inspection is a guided one, whether the techs have switched it on or not, but a big, if you compare the number of recommendations, so edit the pictures, they look pretty even, right? If you look at number of recommendations, you see a difference between Ryan doing 18 in the fourth column. If you could highlight that and colors in the first column doing 11 on average. So I would venture out and say this is a matter of how to set up the inspection and not so much the individual text performance. Using guided will allow you to generate a certain amount of recommendations. What
Bill Connor (12:59):
Do you think? The interesting thing here, both the technicians you pointed out aren’t using guided because there’s no G next to their name.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (13:07):
True.
Bill Connor (13:08):
And then when we get down to some of the other ones, but a lot of it also has to do with the type of vehicles that work on and the climate they’re in. So if you’re in a area that’s got a high mileage vehicles and it’s in a rust belt, they’re literally disintegrating where if you get down in a different area that they drive around in a city like Florida where there’s no salt on the roads and so on, the average number of recommendations may be less. But regardless, it’s really up to the technician to write that prescription in between what a condition based inspection, even in summative warmer areas, they don’t have rust, but we definitely got control arm bushings that are dry rotten, all kinds of other things that dry rot just because of the heat. So most of the time I see on average between seven and 15 is a decent number from between this visit and the next visit if it’s a well-built inspection sheet.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (14:07):
So I agree with you, but even independent of whether you use guided or not, if the inspection is set up correctly. And here’s the fascinating thing, I don’t know whether you did that on purpose, but both shops one and four are how many miles from each other? It’s really few. They have the same climate, they have all makes own models and I believe there’s a difference in the setup of the inspection, which would be worth exploring.
Bill Connor (14:40):
Yep.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (14:44):
You can folks real quick, go ahead,
Tom Dorsey (14:47):
Sit, haven’t done an inspection audit or want to do, what should they do first? Where can they get that resource? Should they just reach out to their AutoVitals advisor and have them walk them through it?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (15:04):
I don’t know. We should reach out to those two shops for example, and ask for permission whether we can compare the inspections.
Tom Dorsey (15:12):
Hey Adam, can we compare your inspection? I don’t know what the other shelf is. Oh that’s brand
Uwe Kleinschmidt (15:22):
And then do
Tom Dorsey (15:24):
Absolutely
Uwe Kleinschmidt (15:25):
Side by side and maybe not in this session, but I think this is really important and I remember Adam, do you remember the show when we talked about how Adam increased his number of recommendations per inspection from, if I’m not mistaken, 11 to 18 on average and he attributed that to sitting down and build in many hours an inspection sheet so it runs on guided, right? So really maybe we can earmark that and look at a guided inspection producing ready to produce 18 recommendations on average. I remember John Long’s number was even higher 25 and he went from 17 to 25 by defining guided, and it’s less actually the guided aspect of it. It’s more sitting down and go through every single topic, map out the conditions and the recommendations. That is where the time is well spent. Although it’s tedious initially.
Bill Connor (16:46):
And so we talk about it being tedious and a lot of time. But again, I like to go ahead and take the mindset is look, if your technicians are supposed to be looking at a certain topic, ask them what job it should produce if there’s a fail, and then ask them what condition it would be and then have your service writer help put that into words that the human can understand. So doing this as a team effort really is a lot better than just the owner or implementer saying, I’m going to do this and you guys are going to follow it. So that participation culture is huge.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (17:22):
Cool. So one hypothesis is the inspection sheet might show differences. What other hypothesis do you have? Just looking at the numbers, why the service advisor efficiency shows a difference between, what was it four hours versus 10 hours per tech? Am I putting you on the spot?
Bill Connor (17:51):
No. Normally when I go and see that the first thing I do is an inspection audit, which we already nailed down that we really need to go ahead and do that. It was really kind of interesting also that when we get down to their motorist research time, I believe that they were relatively close in like 10, 15 seconds of each other. So the quality inspections is one thing, but looking at the inspection sheet would probably be key. And I know both these shops, I know that they take a lot of pictures and they do a pretty decent job editing them. So the question is what drives the additional recommendations? Because those additional recommendations appear to go and get turned into money.
Tom Dorsey (18:36):
Yeah, for sure. It could be culturally, I mean some people are opposed to throwing the kitchen sink at you.
Bill Connor (18:44):
Well, there’s one difference that you’re going to see between the two shops is one I believe uses is or maybe even transitioning to using the production manager. And when they do that, they take the emotion out of pricing. So they’re more apt to go and get everything the technician recommends estimated and present it to the customer than a shop that a service writer has got the emotion that they’re dealing with the customer, if that makes sense.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (19:09):
Oh definitely.
Tom Dorsey (19:10):
Adam’s got a really great point here, really interesting insight. He says that Annie, his BTech talked to him the other day about momentum, keeping up momentum as we go into winter and potentially slower times, it’s much easier to keep up momentum when you have good inspections done and future work to sell poor inspections. You’re just waiting for cars to break than to keep up the momentum and to stoke the fire. Again, if you’re sitting there cold and you’ve just been twiddling your thumbs, it’s a lot harder to get a high speed at the flip of a switch when you get a walk-in or something.
Bill Connor (19:49):
But the whole statement from there really is about culture in the shop because when the technician is coming to you saying, I understand this is how it works, it’s my job to spot needs, document ’em, and then the service writer is going to follow through and do something with ’em and it’s important for us all as a team. To me that’s a positive cultural sign and a shift that we’d really like to drive in all shops, not just a relatively small percentage of ’em compared to the rest. Some of ’em are a little bit more digitally resistant than others, I guess is what I’m saying.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (20:25):
They don’t want to show what’s the KPI we have to introduce to measure culture.
Bill Connor (20:34):
That’s interesting. I’m going to have to think about that in a minute.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (20:40):
Maybe that’s a question for the audience. That’s such a soft but super important attribute. We should really think whether there is a potential KPI, how we can measure it.
Tom Dorsey (20:56):
I think it should be average food cost of staff lunches.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (21:02):
I don’t know.
Tom Dorsey (21:03):
You guys getting bologna sandwiches? Yeah, not such a hot culture.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (21:14):
Cool. I didn’t want to derail you Bill.
Bill Connor (21:17):
Oh, I’m pretty hard to derail. I’m pretty stable. I just wanted to go back so that way people didn’t go ahead and see that you haven’t fixed your lighting.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (21:27):
Thank you for the attention. I hope I fixed it now.
Bill Connor (21:31):
It’s certainly a lot better than it has been. So again, let me go ahead and move back over here to monitor number four of eight. I would assume that you can see it now. So again, this is just comparing shop to shop. What I really like about this is that my goal when I’m working with shops is to go ahead and help them set their goals and then being that I’m like the evil referee that you’ll see in some sporting events, every time you cross the goal line, I’m going to go and move the goalpost. So a lot of people say, well what is my shop number compared to another shop? And in my eyes I really don’t care because what I want to do is I want you to learn how to squeeze the maximum peak level of performance out of your own particular shop database employees, customer base and so on. So I like to come in here and I like to go ahead and set these goals and I like to keep moving them forward. And my goal isn’t to go ahead and see everything on the screen here in green. My goal is to go ahead and keep moving them goals upwards until we can’t go ahead and get anything else out of your shop. And then if you don’t add a more bays or change your pricing model or whatever, then it’s your job to hold ’em there after you find your peak level of performance.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (22:45):
I think that’s an awesome question to the audience if I may. So the question is are you in the mode of upping your goal or are you in the mode of maintaining your goals or are you setting goals for each individual KPI at all?
Tom Dorsey (23:06):
Go ahead and chat those in also if you’ve got any.
Bill Connor (23:10):
I would expect that from Frank right off the bat.
Tom Dorsey (23:15):
Always up in the goal. Yeah, well Frank’s got a huge parking lot out there. He can, he’s very patient customers as well.
Bill Connor (23:23):
Well Frank is one of the people that I like to work with because he and me both believe in moving to goalposts every time you score a touchdown.
Tom Dorsey (23:29):
Yeah, and if you’ve got questions, you’ve got a scenarios, you’ve got a challenge for Bill or Uwe, go ahead and put that in either the chat or the q and a, either one, I’ll see it and find it. If you would give us the name of your shop so we can look at your data if you give us permission to do that and we can dig in and either help you to problem solve or have a nice debate around what Bill or Uwe are showing us.
Bill Connor (24:11):
So as you’re learning to use the business control panel, what I like to do is I like to go in and understand the KPIs and understand how to use ’em as a diagnostic tool. So if your motorist research time, you think it’s in a good place, what I like to do is I like to apply some logic to it. So if I’ve got 8.6 recommendations, I know if that customer was in the shop and they walked out to the car for the technician to take their finger and point at it, tell ’em what it is, what needs to be done, and the reason they should buy today in most shops it takes an average of one minute per recommendation. So if I’ve got 8.6 and I multiply it by 60 seconds, then I know is the motorist research time in the proper area for your particular workflow in your shop. So if you’re making more recommendations, then I would expect a motorist research time to be higher, which here we’re not really seeing that.
Tom Dorsey (25:03):
That’s a great point, right? And that’s just not for motorist research time, that’s for any of your KPIs, any of your metrics. Don’t just have a baseline or a canned number in mind. It has to be specific to your actual operation. If you’ve got 20 recommendations in a 202nd motorist research time, they’re probably not looking at it as deep as they should be.
Bill Connor (25:33):
And then also take into consideration the type of vehicles you work on. If you work on really complex vehicles, you could have a low number of recommended actions here, but it takes longer to explain to the customer. Now you can see the modus research is higher. So that’s why I said understanding your numbers, keep moving them forward, understanding the logic behind them. Another one that’s highly logical is average number of pitchers. If you’ve got 15 recommendations and your average pitcher count is 10, then you’ve kind of missed the ball somewhere. If your average number of recommendations is eight and a half and you’ve got 15 pitchers, now you’ve got eight and a half one pitcher for each thing that’s benfold and mutilated, you’ve probably got four corners, you got instrument cluster and you may have four or five topics that are pictures with measurements on every visit. So just looking at the numbers without some logic that goes behind them is really not as effective as understanding how they relate to each other. And again, I equate this just diagnosing a vehicle. If you go ahead and see something, and again this is like Sesame Street Diagnostics, you come down through here and which one of these things isn’t like the other, then you’ve got a place to go ahead and start dissecting and find out what’s going on.
Tom Dorsey (26:49):
Yeah, that’s a great point. And if you’re a multis shop operator, you can set this business control panel up for multi-locations like Bill has his, and then just like you just go down the list and you look for the outliers, you look for the flags and then you start to drill down. By the way guys, both Teri Scafidi from Eastside Bavarian and Michael Baggett from Pro Automotive Services.
Bill Connor (27:14):
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to stop sharing and I’m going to try and dial them up here so you guys can go ahead and talk while keep looking.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (27:26):
So let me leverage this a little bit and announce that we’re going to start text to pay next week. And we are going to have in the BCP, the number of appointments paid digitally plus the dollar amount paid digitally because we want to see whether there’s a correlation between high number of a high amount has a hesitance to be paid digitally or not. If you see any other interesting KPI you would love to see, please chat it in. Bill, was that enough time for you?
Bill Connor (28:18):
What city is automotive services in Illinois?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (28:26):
Wood River,
Tom Dorsey (28:27):
Wood River.
Bill Connor (28:31):
So I’m going to keep looking here
Tom Dorsey (28:35):
And those, that’s fantastic data. I mean because it’s going to give insights into a lot more that type of demographic and you can even relate that into your marketing, how you target your Facebook ads and your social ads and your AdWord. If that type of consumer is going to have a certain threshold being able that’s the full digital probably millennial type of a consumer, it’s great to know and be able to target them much more effectively.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (29:08):
But it’s also a service advisor thing. So we will find out whether the service advisor has to initiate it. We remind the service advisor to initiate it. There’s a task and you cannot miss it, but there’s no automatic, hey customer pay here. And so this way we will also be able to measure adoption rate to number one, take deposits and number two, pay the final bill.
Tom Dorsey (29:50):
Yeah, I don’t know if you saw Mark Lem post in there, he’s up in Canada, they just switched over to 360 and he’s wondering if it’s going to be available in Canada right out of the gate.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (30:03):
I don’t know why it shouldn’t be.
Bill Connor (30:07):
So I was told by protractor, only difference is in Canada they don’t use the digital signature pad, but he said 360 payments is used by Protractor in Canada
Uwe Kleinschmidt (30:19):
Then it should work. So Mark, it might be a good idea if we add you to the Tobo shops and if you are open to that because then we can find out right away.
Tom Dorsey (30:37):
And he’s saying that they do use the digital signing pads ads also
Bill Connor (30:42):
Add, oh, I went ahead and added these two shops on the first two rows here. So if you want to go ahead and go through them and dissect them, we certainly can.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (30:52):
The challenge is a little bit the shops are not of the same type. So Teri is European and Mike, if I’m not mistaken, this all makes all models
Bill Connor (31:10):
But no matter how different they are from each other, there’s still a lot of things that have to be done the same. So to
Uwe Kleinschmidt (31:17):
Me, no doubt, no doubt, all I’m trying to say is don’t look at the dollar numbers,
Bill Connor (31:23):
Right?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (31:23):
Correct. You have to look at the other numbers, right? Ours.
Tom Dorsey (31:27):
So real quick before we dig in, Adam’s got a question he’s saying on some of the percentages, how come they go over a 100% the inspection rate for shop number four, which was on the previous screen but it was over 100%.
Bill Connor (31:45):
The only time I see that is when a shop is doing more than one unique inspection per repair order.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (31:56):
That’s the explanation.
Bill Connor (32:04):
So if you want to guide me through here,
Tom Dorsey (32:12):
So Adam is shop four and he only has one inspection,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (32:19):
Then we have to dig deeper. So let’s check here inspection rate 52% for Mike’s shop. I think we should look at the insights and see whether that’s a trend or an up and down in the inspection rate.
Bill Connor (33:01):
It’s definitely not consistent.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (33:05):
If
Tom Dorsey (33:05):
You can also, Steve is asking how do you add the breakdown by service advisor slash text to the metrics. And so Steve, what I’m assuming you’re asking for is how do we compare technicians or service advisors in specific metrics? So Bill, if you could show that as we’re drilling down, help Steve out.
Bill Connor (33:29):
So here if he’s not seeing it here, basically he’s just going to be tapping here to go ahead and do it. And then over here on each KPI you select, you’ll be able to go ahead and choose the individual employee.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (33:43):
So maybe we start with the inspection rate from Mike and Mike, you have to give us permission to show your tech name, text names because we don’t want to or we can do that later. So he says it’s fine. Yep. So go to the inspection rate and then compare, look at the individual tax. So Dave is in good shape compared with the average, right? Eric is slightly higher than the,
Bill Connor (34:26):
It’s interesting though that he’s got a bunch of days that are a hundred percent and then we come down to some that are nothing
Tom Dorsey (34:32):
And it looks like at the same time uptrending car count.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (34:45):
I think Mike doesn’t count because he’s helping.
Bill Connor (34:48):
I was thinking he shouldn’t be in the shop.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (34:50):
Yep. See Richard is one of the ones pulling the
Tom Dorsey (34:58):
Slacker.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (34:59):
The inspection down. Slacker, Ron. Okay, so
Bill Connor (35:10):
We’re looking at it here and where I kind of like to go ahead and start this journey was I come over here, I want to go ahead and look at it here so that way I instantly know where my targets are. And when you look, these guys are still showing a pretty good average, but when you start getting in and looking at the individual data,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (35:25):
No, no, that’s the wrong shop. Go back next column.
Bill Connor (35:32):
There we go.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (35:33):
There you see it already. Yeah, totally. I should shut up and let you do it. But the graph shows there is an inconsistency, Mike, right? So there are circumstances you probably know better than us where certain processes get cut short on certain days and it might have to do with car count going up, it might have to do with something else that would be a question to you. So that’s one of the most difficult ones. If there’s a consistent trend up or down, you can work on this much more easily and corrected than an inconsistent trend where is no real trend, right? There are days where it’s perfect and other days there it’s not. And so it would be really interesting to hear your opinion, Mike, what the reason is for the up and down. And what I also would like to ask you is do you do a weekly shop meeting, for example, where you could go through this and then determine it
Tom Dorsey (37:02):
So I can promote ’em to panelist if you want. If that’s okay with you Mike?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (37:09):
Yeah, sure. Mike, just let us know whether you are game.
Bill Connor (37:18):
So while he’s doing that, I’m going to come over here and kind of do, what I’d like to normally do is I like to come in when I go ahead and find something that I’m working on with an individual staff member, I’ll actually come over here and I’ll build a preset form based on the KPIs they’re working on. So we’re going to come over here and just choose this. And this is pro automotive,
Tom Dorsey (37:52):
So Mike’s in as a panelist. So Mike, whenever you want to unmute, you’ll be live. You’ll make sure you got clothes on if you’re going to turn on your camera. This is a PG show we’re on here buddy. This isn’t CNN.
Bill Connor (38:14):
There he is.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (38:15):
Hello mate, how are you buddy? You’re still muted. Let me see whether I can unmute this.
Tom Dorsey (38:20):
I got it.
Bill Connor (38:21):
There he is.
Michael Baggett (38:24):
My lovely wife is with us also, just so you know.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (38:28):
Hello.
Tom Dorsey (38:30):
Welcome.
Michael Baggett (38:33):
So the question was inconsistencies correct? Yes. Yeah, I really don’t know how to explain. I don’t look at this page very often to be honest with you. Okay. I know that our data is probably skewed because we cover your ears Uwe, we left AutoVitals for about 30 days,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (38:56):
Right? Yeah, no I know.
Michael Baggett (38:58):
I think we had a couple discussions via text and I appreciate you answering me back. But what I’ve committed to is basically once we, we’ve been with you guys for so long and I just seemed overwhelmed by everything that is possible and so I went to something I thought was going to be a little simpler and it was way too dumbed down. I just absolutely couldn’t stand myself. I mean it was horrible. But anyway, so I recommitted myself and I want to learn this and figure it out so that I can use it to the best of my advantage.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (39:38):
Cool. Bill, would you mind comparing two technicians because then we will see whether the inconsistency is due to a shop wide challenge or individual challenge
Tom Dorsey (39:53):
And go kind of slow so folks can see this because probably a lot of people don’t know that we have this capability.
Bill Connor (40:03):
So what I did is I come over here and I turned on what would be my second lab scope trace. It’s got the same time period on it now I’ve come down to the KPI and I guess you tell me what other technician you would like to put in here for comparison.
Michael Baggett (40:15):
Who do we have up here now? Is that Dave?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (40:19):
We have Richard and yeah, let’s compare it with Dave because Dave I think had the highest, if I’m not mistaken,
Michael Baggett (40:27):
Ronnie’s on vacation.
(40:31):
Yeah, Ronnie’s actually off on vacation. He’s been out for three weeks. So
Uwe Kleinschmidt (40:40):
Can you switch off the average of ROS written per day? So we have only an inspection rate bill, so it’s not so busy. Thank you. See, it’s interesting, I don’t think there’s a pattern we can see in the inspection rate.
Bill Connor (41:02):
Well, I mean here we’ve got almost no inspections being done and this guy here is relatively consistent. He’s got a few dropouts and sometimes I like to hover over these and find out is every one of the dropouts here is on a Monday or is it on a Friday? And things like that. You’d be surprised what you can find just by hovering over to different days. So this one’s a Thursday, this one’s a Tuesday, that one’s a Thursday, that one’s a Tuesday. That’s interesting.
Michael Baggett (41:32):
All the T days.
Bill Connor (41:35):
So it’s kind of interesting what you’ll find out when you just start and it’s just diagnosing a vehicle. You’re looking for the dropouts or changed or what I call glitches. And you can see here that we are running smooth and then all of a sudden we’ve got some glitches and we’re run smooth again and now we’ve got some glitches again and now we’re running smooth again
Michael Baggett (41:54):
From a technician. I’d call that a misfire.
Bill Connor (41:57):
Okay,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (42:00):
Can you overlay car count?
Bill Connor (42:02):
Sure.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (42:07):
You probably have to uncheck one of the other ones
Bill Connor (42:11):
Who’s driving this bus.
Tom Dorsey (42:13):
And folks, if you notice when bill’s doing those hover overs on those data points, it shows all of the additional KPIs that you have selected. And so when you’re doing that, that’s a really great way to spot check. You just select the metrics that should be monitored. If you’re looking at technicians average number of recommendations, you’re going to want to see that in comparison to ARO and some other. And then as you go through you’ll be able to see is one of those out of line or more and then drill down into those as well. And that’s what I was saying earlier is that’s how you really get down to the root cause and it becomes pretty evident what you need to do to improve.
Bill Connor (42:59):
So what I would like here on either one of these is would be the technicians here listed also. So we can go and see how many vehicles they’re touching per day. I can do it but as service riders, but that’s not going to go and give me my equivalent here. So maybe that’s something we probably need to consider.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (43:18):
But just to answer the question, the inconsistency is not through car count. There is no, all of a sudden the shop got super busy because the cars just came in and the inspection has been neglected. That’s not the case. So there must be something else, Mike, which so our recommendation is simply that you check this out on those graphs and then either do it in a team meeting with everybody or in a one-on-one depending on how your culture is, and then identify new goals for those people. Does it make sense? I mean is that
Michael Baggett (44:04):
Yes.
Tom Dorsey (44:05):
And also Mike, if you don’t have ’em set already, set up your alerts, your notifications because when that inspection rate drops from 95 down to 60, you’re going to get a notification and at least you can go out and kind of see what’s happening and make some notes. We had a guy out at that time and so he was doing double duty or whatever it might be and to give you some better into what’s happening in those areas.
Bill Connor (44:35):
So Mike, one of the things I also like to do is I like to go and think about training puppies and then the human, they kind of get trained the same way. Constant praise or constant correction. So if I’ve got something here and I’m working on these two techs specifically on their inspection rate, I might come in here on a morning and go ahead and prepare for a morning meeting and just change this to seven days and just review with them what they’re paid and close and posted invoices from the day before was so that way you’re not waiting for a full 30 days to go ahead and get some improvement. So rapid continuous improvement comes with constant monitoring and to me, I like to use the constant praise and constant correction method is that when they’re doing good I’m going to always try and find something they’re doing good and I’m going to ask them on the things that they’re struggling on a little bit, what can I do to help you get these other numbers up?
(45:25):
But I really like to go ahead and prep for and conduct a five minute morning meeting with the different staff members to go ahead and highly focus them on just one or two things for each employee because every employee’s going to be in a different spot on a journey as they go through your digital transformation in your shop. So I just like to go and do a quick meeting with ’em and based on data. So it’s not personal that this is the results from yesterday and I know this is important to you and I both, how can I help you go and do this?
Tom Dorsey (45:56):
So we got a couple questions from the audience there. Frankie’s asking, and this is to determine why we’re seeing the glitches. Does every AROhave an inspection line automatically and Adam is asking, are there follow up appointments that aren’t getting inspections that could be thrown off the data?
Bill Connor (46:18):
That’s a great,
Michael Baggett (46:19):
That’s completely possible as far as a follow-up that didn’t come back for some recommended work that doesn’t necessarily get an inspection. That’s completely possible.
Bill Connor (46:31):
And so when we’re talking to our technicians about that, we also want to remove from the equation that if they come back for a follow-up appointment, if it’s within two weeks, we’re not going to count that against ’em anyways. So kind of be thinking if they’re scheduling back in and it’s outside of that two week range, we would normally expect an inspection because there’s lots of crap that can go on in the real world in two weeks, but if it’s within that two week period, then we’re not going to go ahead and count that against ’em if they don’t do an inspection.
Michael Baggett (47:00):
Makes sense.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (47:01):
And Mike, you use Napa tracks enterprise if I’m not mistaken, is that correct?
Michael Baggett (47:07):
That is correct.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (47:09):
Does it have a feature what Frank is saying, which is really helpful as a reminder, every OO gets automatically an inspection line added. Maybe that’s the first line on every work order and so creating a work order automatically
Bill Connor (47:30):
That’s not a feature of enterprise, if that’s what you’re asking or Yeah,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (47:34):
That’s what I’m asking.
Michael Baggett (47:35):
It’s definitely not a feature, it’s something that we’ve just done. I mean for the most part, I mean everybody knows everything at least gets the standard DVI and or if it’s been here recently, it gets a basic inspection. The lights make sure the blinkers and tail lights and everything are working, but every AROshould get some sort of inspection assigned to it, but it has to be done manually.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (48:06):
Yeah, that might be a good first step. You could do right? Check Theos, do an audit of Theos so that service advisors put that first line on. Theo looks the same for every car. It’s an inspection.
Bill Connor (48:23):
Yeah, most shops we work with, we try and get them to start doing that from day one. So just like a technician can’t turn down a wheel alignment or a brake job or whatever, if you put the line on the repair order, there’s no gray area. The service rider has had a conversation with the customer, the customer is aware it’s not going to be a surprise inspection and there’s really isn’t any negative for the technician to not do the inspection.
Michael Baggett (48:49):
Correct.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (48:51):
We have 10 minutes left. Should we jump to another shot, summarize maybe with Mike what our recommendations are and then jump to another shop or what do you guys think?
Bill Connor (49:07):
I think we should probably summarize just like we would do if we were on a call with the shop, go ahead and summarize the call, give him some takeaways to work on, see if he agrees to doing his homework, and then we can check back at a later date to see what his score on his homework is.
Tom Dorsey (49:24):
Yeah, because I’m going to be twisting Mike’s arm I think to get him on a show here coming up. So that might be a great segue.
Michael Baggett (49:35):
And there’s some conversations that I want have Bill and Uwe about some features that AutoVitals does or doesn’t or maybe I’m not aware of.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (49:47):
Sure.
Michael Baggett (49:49):
Okay, I’m
Tom Dorsey (49:49):
Ready. That’s fantastic.
Bill Connor (49:53):
So my takeaway would be to go ahead and work on getting the line on the repair order to go ahead and make sure that the service writer has had a conversation with the customer about what inspections going to be done. Then get the technician to go and do it and make sure it stays consistent by maybe prepping and conducting that five minute walkthrough with ’em in the morning say, and I would probably pick more than just one KPI would probably pick to show them the inspection rate would be great, but I would also want to show them at the same time the average hours per repair order. So that way this is the input I need you to put in here and this is what you should expect as an output. If you do an inspection, you make the recommendation, your hours per repair orders should go up and then you have less trips to the parking lot and less racking and racking vehicles. So that way you’re helping him understand what’s in it for him in it rather than just doing more work.
Michael Baggett (50:47):
Okay.
Bill Connor (50:49):
Do you have anything you’d like to add to that Uwe?
Uwe Kleinschmidt (50:52):
No, I think we should start really with simple things and create consistency. I would completely focus on inspection rate and review with the text on a daily basis as you proposed. And then Bill, I don’t know whether you would be willing to do inspection sheet review just with Mike.
Bill Connor (51:12):
Sure.
Michael Baggett (51:14):
Yeah. That seems to be somewhere I think that we’re struggling our inspection sheets, building them out, getting them correct.
Bill Connor (51:25):
A lot of question always is with NAPA tracks users and enterprise especially is how many labor codes can jobs do you have in Napa tracks?
Michael Baggett (51:34):
Not enough. And I need a better understanding of how you guys are using the can jobs. So that may be a discussion that we can have.
Bill Connor (51:47):
Awesome. And I think I’ve finally found a way to go ahead and import all the can jobs into Napa track’s enterprise and one fell scoop. We’re experimenting with a couple shops right now and maybe we can shortcut that process also.
Michael Baggett (52:03):
Okay.
Bill Connor (52:04):
That’s the main objection people have to using can jobs in certain POS systems is how the hell do I get all them in there?
Michael Baggett (52:13):
Yeah, I mean obviously you got to put in the time, so I mean I’ve recommitted myself so I’m available.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (52:25):
Sounds like we should have a full series with Mike. Yes. Create a case study. Yeah. Okay. Mike, thank you very much for being so open and transparent. Highly appreciated.
Bill Connor (52:43):
Those that volunteer always get the best results from it always.
Michael Baggett (52:49):
I don’t know, I don’t like being in the public eye, but maybe we’ll get my wife on here.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (52:59):
Okay. I appreciate it. We have six minutes left. Is there a quick analysis of Teri’s numbers possible? Bill, what do you think?
Bill Connor (53:11):
How about we go ahead and pull it up on the screen and look through it? I would assume you can see the screen.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (53:18):
Yep. Yep.
Bill Connor (53:20):
And now if I could find out where I moved the mouse to, we can kind of scroll down through here and see if anything jumps out to you. So they’re definitely doing a lot of inspections and it looks like it’s consistent across the board. It looks like the technicians and service writers are participating in the editing process. Although Sesame Street says one of these things don’t look like the other, for sure. Average number of pictures taken, looks like they’re giving some to work with, the inspections are being sent. Modus research time is good. Average number of recommendations is I would highly encourage them to go ahead and set their goal to at least what they’re doing now so they don’t have a tendency to achieve the goal that’s actually there.
Tom Dorsey (54:08):
Yeah,
Uwe Kleinschmidt (54:08):
Why don’t you do that right away, Teri, how is 10 pictures recommended actions as a goal?
Tom Dorsey (54:25):
Frank said don’t raise the bar, set the bar. Teri said that’s the gold will update. I think Teri Bill’s going to do it for you,
Bill Connor (54:37):
So let’s just go ahead and put this right here for right now and then keep working on it. And so their average hours for repair order, these men
Tom Dorsey (54:46):
Brag
Bill Connor (54:48):
Somebody must have closed out a really big repair order, but as a European shop it’s really not hard to go and have all the repair orders be in the five or six hour range. They’re normally pretty labor intensive. So that’s kind of interesting. You got a group of guys about in the same place here. I would assume this is a five day a week shop and you can tell me if I’m wrong and I would guess these guys here are more general service type guys.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (55:34):
It looks like Dave is helping out also as a service advisor and filling in,
Tom Dorsey (55:41):
You said, yeah, five days a week.
Bill Connor (55:43):
And so if they’re doing that, I always go ahead and make sure the shop goes ahead and actually uses tee time and then sets a tee time for in office. So that way when you go ahead and pull up those reports, you can see how many hours they spent working as a service advisor or in the office versus in the shop. So that way you got a more true picture of what’s going on.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (56:11):
So by the way, bill, for your information, Teri over the years has built I think the currently biggest library of canned jobs with like 6,000
Bill Connor (56:28):
Because Yep. I’ve only seen one other protractor shop close to that so far.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (56:36):
And so there is a big decision to be made. So either you start creating, make specific inspection sheets or the recommended action is going to be generic and will be then replaced by the make specific.
Bill Connor (56:59):
I could tell them right quick what the other shop did because they only specialize in Toyota Lexus only. They actually opted to go ahead and make one generic inspection sheet and then they cloned it and then they went ahead and made an inspection sheet for different models of vehicles that have the service packages for those models actually embedded it. So they took their main inspection sheet, made it generic so they can work on anything that comes in the door. And then they’ve got ones that are model specific and when the service rider puts it on a repair order, if they have a model specific, they use that one. So it pretty much literally builds the repair order in protractor.
Uwe Kleinschmidt (57:40):
Teri uses civilian works if I’m not mistaken. Okay. Anything else you can see? Because we’re going close to the end. I mean this looks pretty amazing to
Bill Connor (57:53):
Me. Yeah, it’s a pretty solid shop. They got the processes down pretty good and that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t go in here for individual employees and probably find stuff, but I don’t think we have the time to do that right now.
Tom Dorsey (58:06):
Yeah, you ain’t going to find much.
Bill Connor (58:09):
Well, there’s almost no shop that when you start getting down to the employee level that there’s not something that everybody can be working on to go ahead and get a tuneup. And I told this to Adam the other day, it’s kind of like building a race car. You can always go ahead and improve the lap time by just tweaking a few little things. And it’s the same thing for your shop. Of course you got a tickle out of that if you know Adam.
Tom Dorsey (58:30):
Yeah, of course. That’s where you want to get to anyway. That’s how you make it to the Super Bowl right now you’re just splitting the frog hairs and you’re fine tuning and you’re squeezing out the peak performance. And that is a great place to be when you’re operating a automotive repair shop, that’s for sure. But yeah, fantastic show. We got about a minute. I mean what a great and a lot of great information. We’ll be adding this as a regular recurrence just like we’re doing the ask me Anything with the expert panel of experts and so look forward to it next week. I’m working on getting this, he’s out hunting though, so I guess they got a really limited hunting season and I’m trying to pin this guy down. He’s going to be a great show for you. And so I’ll announce tomorrow in the email. But regardless, every topic that we have on here, every show that we have on here is worth tuning in for. So next Wednesday, 1:00 PM Eastern, 10:00 AM Pacific Time, tune in for Digital Shop Talk Radio and we’ll do it again. We really appreciate everybody’s attendance and participation. Thank you very much. And until next Wednesday, get out there and make some more money. We’ll talk to you then. Thanks. Thanks Mike. Thanks Teri. Thank you guys.
(59:56):
Adam, everybody. John.