Chris Collins gives practical management advice for improving shop production: hold 10–15 minute monthly goal-setting meetings with each technician (treating them as professionals and discussing production and development) and post/track production daily, arguing that what you measure and focus on grows.
How to drive production. The first one is you would have goals with your technicians monthly. So every one of your technicians you would sit down with for 10 or 15 minutes every month, and you would talk about their production, what they can do better. But you would treat them like professionals that are trying to get better, trying to improve. You would talk about their schooling, everything else, but you would have specific goals. You would post production daily. So I don't know how many shops out there. The shop is a production facility. But most of the time, we're not tracking production daily. We might be tracking it monthly, we might be tracking it by pay period, but we're not tracking it daily. When you track it daily, anything you shine a light on or give energy to grows. So if production is the priority, then we should be looking at it constantly.
