Articles

For most of the nineties and now in the 21st Century I am starting to get annoyed with the constant drumbeat that we can’t find mechanics. When will we start taking some responsibility and attack this problem head on? Time is passing us by and it is starting to become serious.

In most of the dealerships that I visit and talk to I hear a constant refrain. The market is much, much larger than we can handle. We are turning work away daily because we don’t have enough mechanics. Our backlog is too large. We can’t get to the customer in a timely manner and they go elsewhere. Imagine letting a machine sale get by us because we couldn’t find a machine?

The first order of business is to deal with the truth of managing the labor inventory. The inventory of mechanics is the only inventory in the dealership where we can not have any underutilized inventory. Too much unapplied time elicits a “get rid of someone” comment. I don’t hear that about machines that haven’t sold in over a year, or parts that haven’t met company stocking parameters. Yet don’t have an extra hour of labor lying around or else you will be told you have too many people.

Service Managers have learned how to deal with this situation though. They would rather use overtime than have the right number of mechanics because each of the mechanics on the payroll is a person and the service management doesn’t like to let people go. Who does? It is understandable isn’t it?

We need to break this cycle or we will continue to lose customers. Remember the statistics from the Product Support Opportunities Handbook; The one where the customers say that in 44% of their cases they have chosen someone other than the OEM dealer for their service repairs and maintenance over a five year period. Remember that one?

The customers said that price, responsiveness, convenience and quality were the reasons for their selection of a source for labor. Seems like the number of technicians impacts on two of those reasons. Yet we still haven’t taken this seriously.

How about doing something?

• Hire helpers to work with your journeymen
• Work with the technical schools
• Send young starting mechanics to colleges
• Pay more
• Put in incentives based on performance
• Have regular testing for the mechanics
• Provide more than 40 hours of training to the mechanics you employ
• Accept more unapplied time to sustain responsiveness
• Reduce overtime and increase safety
• Review your labor backlog daily

Check out some of the positive things about your Service Department:

• It is truly the only aspect of your business that you have that differentiates you.
• It generates a lot of your parts business.
• It has the highest gross profit of the sales, rentals, parts and service departments.

And let’s get more serious. Check out the age demographics of your best mechanics. What about your field staff? How many of them, what percentage, are over 50 years old? How about your best mechanics; what percentage are over 50 years old. This is not about age discrimination at all. This is a physical job and one that does not have an indefinite life. How about using some of these talented people as trainers in the department?

I believe that each dealership should be hiring AT LEAST an additional 10% of their current staff each quarter. There is clearly enough business out there to absorb that additional capacity. Perhaps this is a combination problem. We might need to get serious about product support sales at the same time. How many dealerships are out there that have as many product support salesmen as equipment salesmen? How about you? When you look at a dealership and the market coverage aspect; the customer retention statistics; the low market shares in parts and service; it isn’t a pretty picture.

This picture will not change until we address the mechanical workforce issues. We need more people; we need to pay better than we are; we need to continuously train mechanics; in short we NEED them much more than we realize. The time to address this is NOW. If not now when do you think it would be appropriate?