Chris Collins helps Amanda fix her dealership service department, which has $20k in parts sitting on open repair orders and vehicles without any paperwork. He recommends triaging the backlog, pausing new appointments until it clears, and hiring better technicians.
Foreign.
It's that time. It's Friday Drive by time where we answer your questions. Now get a pen, get a piece of paper. Or you know, really, you could just write this on your arm and it doesn't matter. Roll up your sleeve. The phone number is 8333 Ask STR. That's 8333, ask SDR where we answer your questions, the ones that are pressing that would make your life so much better if you just had a little insight, a different take on it. Let's get to the first question.
Hey, Chris. My name is Amanda. I am a service advisor for a Ford and Chrysler dealership. I left a power sports dealership to come to the automotive industry. And.
Upon entering the dealership, the service manager was giving his two weeks notice.
The advisor.
Was stepping up to service manager. Now my problem is that the advisor before he was service manager was doing a rather poor job.
And now I just have a disorganized mess of a work environment. There's no systems in place for anything. I have vehicles backed up. I have a lot that is full of cars that don't have ros made for them. I don't know who they belong to. I don't know what their issues are. I have people calling on a daily basis wondering when their vehicles are going to be done. And it's the first time I've ever heard about the vehicle. I have about $20,000 in parts for open ros sitting in my parts department that I can't get ahold of the people. It's been some, well, some of them have been as long as a year.
And I'm sure those people have just gone somewhere else to have the work done.
What should my first step be in trying to turn this service department around? I have.
Three Ford technicians and two Chrysler technicians. I'm the only service advisor. My Ford technicians are very sloppy. They're what you may consider a parts cannon.
Little diag if any, before they're just guessing at what's wrong.
Sounds like you have quite a situation, Amanda. I'm not sure how much of what I'm about to say you'll be able to do if you have a manager and you and the manager aren't on the same page. So I get that. But if it was me going into that situation.
And I need a lot more information, like how far out are you booked? Is the department profitable or not? Like there's a lot of important ingredients that I would need to really give you advice. But just, let's just attack the work Part what I would do is I would get all of your repair orders that aren't done or haven't been fixed. I would put them in the order of importance. I would figure out which ones I have parts for, which ones I don't. And then I would literally shut off the appointments for as many days as it takes to get caught up. I would just shut off appointments. I'd black it out. Don't bring anybody else. If drive ins come in, write them up, but don't make any appointments and get to where water finds even ground to zero and then.
Start writing again and slow it down. It sounds like you need more tech, so I would hire techs. Most of the time these sorts of situations are only fixed by hiring techs. It sounds like you need more techs and better techs, but I would cut off the, the input and address what you have before you bring in more work. You should know by looking at those ros is that cut it off for one day, two days. I've literally cut service departments off for, I think the most I ever did was three days to get caught up. I remember a dealership in Odessa, Texas that literally there was a truck that had been there two years. The RO was open and the customer was still waiting for it was nutty. But we had so much work.
And, you know, there had been so much turnover that, you know, was missing information. We had, you know, we had to literally hire a private investigator to figure some of it out. But they cut it off for three days, got caught up, and then kind of started at a point of manageable traffic there. So that would be my advice. I, I hope this works out. If there's anything we can do, you know, we do have people, people on our team that we could send in for, you know, a period of time to just fix this sort of thing.
It's not cheap, but the money you'll save in the long run, it, you know, is more than worth it. So if you need something like that, let us know. Reach out infohriscollinsinc.com thanks for the question. Hope everybody has a great weekend and we'll see you next time on Service Drive Revolution. Thanks for watching this week's Drive By. I hope we gave you something to think about over the weekend. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers chriscollinsinc.com. i'm Chris Collins and I'll see you in the next video.
