The Cost of Poor Repairs
Featured in Fixed Ops (Body Shop focus) - November/December 2019
By Michael Lanza, Sherwin-Williams Automotive Finishes
When consultants work with top-tier collision centers, there are a few topics we almost always discuss. We continually speak and strategize on reduction of cycle times and increasing touch times. We talk of damage analysis and parts correctness in order to produce more cars by reducing variabilities. We analyze pay plans to make staff more productive and we talk about staging of vehicles and equipment for efficiency and ease of accessibility.
These are all critical conversations toward consistency and control in a high-variable industry. However, there is a topic we need to speak about more often and in greater depth: The true cost of poor quality and re-do’s.
Poor quality occurs across the collision industry at every level. Small shops and large shops. MSOs and dealers. When a vehicle is in-process or sitting on the delivery line, there is often no standard performance in place to assure a quality product. Many shops have an official standard operations procedure. Unfortunately, these too often are not enforced, and therefore not followed.
As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, plan to fail. All shops believe they perform well with quality repair. The reality is many shops are relying on luck. Luck that everything goes well, the parts fit, delays won’t cause technicians to rush, color is not an issue, the Insurance company approves additional repairs and parts in a timely manner, and so on.
Most shops rate quality primarily on customer feedback. This reliance on luck, without an enforced set of regular procedures, contributes to lack of focus on quality cycle time. Customer experience suffers as a result, and inevitably, there will be difficult issues at delivery. Beyond a financial impact, discovering poor quality at delivery is a blow to a shop’s reputation, which is impossible to place a value on.
By relying on an enforced standard with multiple checkpoints throughout the process, shops can avoid the time-consuming consequences of discovering errors only at the end of the repair process. The time spent locating the technician responsible for the error, working the vehicle back into the production process and correcting the error is a needless hit to cycle time. Real-time management of the quality control process, recording failures via photos and notes and immediately notifying the technician before the vehicle proceeds is a reliable way to standardize accountability and reduce waste.
The highest-performing shops across the industry are not waiting until delivery to find out if their work met customer expectations. These shops take a proactive approach with in-process blueprinting and parts correction, both helping to eliminate errors, reducing delays and ensure a more predictable outcome. These shops take an approach to quality assurance that goes beyond simply walking out to the vehicle and conducting color match and body panel fit verification, or even a line-by-line check against the repair order. For theses shops, a quality repair standard starts at the beginning of the customer cycle and continues from the time the vehicle is dropped, through the repair process as it moves from department to department, until the keys are handed back to the customer in person.
Poor quality is an industry-wide challenge. While the impact is different for each shop, there is indeed an impact. We can all benefit from taking a hard look at quality assurance procedures and eliminating guesswork and assumptions. We can all benefit from reviewing past complaints and standardizing ways in which they can be averted in the future. We can all benefit from a quality assurance approach that focuses on customer satisfaction with not only the physical repair but also level of service.
The customer’s trust and happiness with all aspects of their repair experience over time is what builds an impeccable reputation. Simply having the vehicle drive away is no longer enough. Asking that customer if they are completely satisfied with their repair journey, and standardizing corrections wherever needed, is the key to consistent delivery of exceptional repair and outstanding customer experience.
About the Author:
Mike Lanza is manager-business consulting services for Sherwin-Williams Automotive Finishes. He has over 30 years of automotive industry experience managing collision centers, independents and MSOs. He is a proven leader, with expertise in business center expansion through Lean and process-driven operations, and is also a Lean Six-Sigma Green Belt.
