Episode 039: Standard Repair Times

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show. All right.

Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. Glad to have you with us. As always, I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today again by Jeff Jenkins. Hey, hello, hello, and Steve Saltskiver.

Great to be here.

This is going to be a fun topic today because this, Steve, is one that I have heard you talk about numerous times, and it's always one of my favorites whenever you talk about it. Today we're talking about standard repair times. So why don't you lead us off a little bit, talk to us about what they are and a little bit about why somebody would need to care about standard repair times.

Okay, probably the biggest definition of a standard repair time, where you get that from, is each of us have always had, most likely have had a warranty on our car. And they'll give you back an invoice and it tells you exactly how much time that took and what that might have cost. Because all the manufacturers, they have set up times for every type of job on a vehicle. Every part that gets replaced, diagnostic time it takes to get that diagnosed, all that. Everything we do on a car actually has some kind of job standard for each task. The reason those are important for a fleet, if you're doing it, particularly if you're doing internal maintenance, is it's an efficiency measure for your mechanic. A lot of people will track, for example, direct and indirect labor, which we have in our, in our system here, but that doesn't really give you a good measure of what efficiency is. I mean, someone could be taking 10 hours to do an A inspection that really takes 2 hours. Okay. And, but, but it looks like they're like 100% direct labor all day long and they don't have any indirect labor. So that's really what the importance of standard repair times are. They're a gauge that you're able to measure against the standard and hold people accountable. We talk a lot about extreme ownership and accountability. An SRT is really what holds your mechanics accountable.

Well, I think it helps from, from an overall shop operation is you're holding yourself accountable and being able to demonstrate if you share these, you know, and hopefully your customers are asking for this, whether you're an internal service fund with the government fleet or something else, but they're asking to show justification about why did it take you 3 hours to do that job? Is that reasonable? You know, as we're looking at A lot of, you know, for government fleet especially, the threat of privatization is always there and being able to justify yourself to your police chief or to the fire department or sanitation, you know, that you can kind of show, no, this is the standard repair time as set by the OEM or by, you know, some of these other sources that are out there. They can kind of show, yeah, we're being efficient. You know, we're skilled, we're meeting our times. We're finding where we need work. I think that's something else that I look for in SRTs is it actually helps me as I look at a micro level, mechanic by mechanic, technician by technician, that I can see them and see where, you know, hey, Technician A, George, is struggling a little bit on brake jobs, but doing really well with exhaust systems.

Right, for training.

Right. And I can see training needs where I can, okay, well, let's go send George to some training on brake systems for Ford. You know, you can even break it down that granularly. Well, maybe they do really well with Chevy and GM products, but they're not doing very good with Ford and Lincoln.

If you're running a very efficient shop too, it also allows you to schedule in advance, be proactive, right? Because you can sit down the day before or the night, evening before, and you can say, okay, I've got all these X number of jobs, and then just add them up. What's it going to take? How many mechanics do I anticipate coming in tomorrow? How many hours do I have available? So you can actually proactively schedule in advance, which, as everybody knows, if you're at some of these shops, you're running around your hair on fire trying to figure out what to do and how many resources I need. So it allows you a little bit of peace of mind as you're going through that process to be proactive.

Overall, how many government fleets or anybody that's in this space do you feel actually measure SRTs? I'm just curious.

I would probably say, I would guess, I don't know exactly, but I'd say probably 20 to 30%, maybe. That's a high number.

I think it depends. Like, I'm a little bit biased because we put it into our system, and how many of them are actually using it, that's a tough question because it's on by default for everybody.

That's probably the toughest question, actually.

You know, it's how many of them have gone through and set up their own SRTs. I could probably get that data, but How many are actually using it? I would tell you 80 or 90% have data. Just whether or not they're using it is the question.

Yeah, I would guess half. If I'm gonna do a healthy guess, I'd say half do and half don't, because I've gone places where this was not measured at all. It was just kind of like the mechanics are assigned a job, when he's done, he's done, and go ahead and give him a new one.

Depends on where you go. I mean, I was at a corporate, a waste company. We put up the success of each mechanic in a shop. Every week, kind of a rank and spank list, we called it. And people, we didn't put the real poor performers on, but we put the top performers, which is just, all the poor performers say, "Well, why am I not on that list?" 'Cause you're getting spanked. So we didn't call bad attention to them, but it allows them, they're competitive, they wanna know. It also allows you to do evaluations on your mechanics, do one-on-ones, and identify areas of improvement, skills that need to be improved, training needs to happen.

And I think that's why it's hard for me to say how many people are using it or not, because it is such an integral part of how we do our Paperless Shop and our mechanic scheduling. That's where I say, you know, I think a lot more of our customers are using it than not because it is such a big part of like our activity screen. And we show them a dashboard and like, hey, you're green, you're green, nope, you're yellow, you're getting close, you're getting close, nope, now you're over, you're red. And like they can see a scorecard almost real time about how they're doing against the SRT. So like a lot of people end up setting it up just because they don't like seeing the red. Otherwise it would default to 0.3 hours for everything and, and, you know, they would always be red. Right. Very little takes more than 18 minutes. So it takes less than 18 minutes.

That allows it— it allows supervisors to do a skill assessment every year, you know, on your mechanics and see where the shortfalls are. And, you know, a lot of people don't do that, but it's important.

I mean, well, it is important, but it's kind of like we talk about one-on-ones. Most people don't do them.

Yeah, but they're important.

Even though they're important, right? It's one of those things that, yes, it's important, but do people actually do it? Because, you know, we talk about the kind truth and just some of those things and difficult conversations a lot of people don't want to have. So if Steve is taking 3 hours longer than he should on a job, I don't want to say something to Steve about it. I'm just going to let him keep taking 3 hours longer and then when he's done, he's done.

Well, this is almost going to force you to have that difficult conversation.

It is.

People probably would avoid it. Because they know it's going to force them to do like, hey, we're going to put this uncomfortable truth right in your face and you're going to have to do something about it. Well, I'm just not going to do that.

Yep.

But if you're talking about an intentional culture, this is a perfect way to do it.

It is. That's why I brought it up.

Yeah.

Well, I think from an employee engagement standpoint too, one of the things that we talk about is that employees like to know the score.

Yes.

They like to know how they're doing and how to measure whether or not they did a good job that day. And SRTs are a great way for the shop, for the technicians, to know a part of their score. It's not the end-all be-all, but it's a great way for them to know how they're doing individually.

Well, if you worked in a private shop like a retail shop, you're going to be on flat rate, which is all SRTs.

100%. Yep.

So if you're not hitting 100%, you're not making the wage at that— somewhere like that. Yeah.

So what are some sources if they want to go out and find, you know, our listeners want sources for standard repair times for their fleets? How do they go out and find where— what the standard repair time is for a specific vehicle?

Well, I think most people are familiar with Mitchell On Demand as one source. Chilton's Motor Manual has them.

Yeah, I know one that Grandpa always talked about was Chilton's.

Yeah, they always have them. They have them online now. They're easy. They have APIs. You can interface them with your systems. One I found particularly useful, especially if you're just starting out with this, There's one called Real Time Labor out of Orlando, Florida, and it's just cheap. It's like less than $300 a year. It's all online. I used that several times when I was doing a trucking company because I would calibrate invoices and go through and, you know, make sure the invoices were correct that were coming to me from an outside vendor. Because, you know, I mean, even outside vendors are not Perfect when they're charging you, you know, an hourly rate to do a job. So it's a good way to validate their charges, make sure they're not charging 2 hours too long for a brake job or, you know, and hold them accountable. And I'll tell you what, they're really surprised when you call them on the phone and say, hey, you know, this labor is about 2 hours too high. They get real defensive about that.

But I mean, oh, well, you had this bolt up in there and the housing was messed up and rusted and blah, blah, blah.

But it allows you to open up a conversation about negotiation, right? That's really what's important, because most people will negotiate with, yeah, we took long, we had to seize Bolden, you know.

And well, because they want to invest in the partnership, right? They don't want this to be a one-time-and-done thing. They want to have a long-term good relationship with you. And so there is an imperative, but you can only have that if the communication is going both ways.

Right, exactly.

And if you don't even know what questions to ask, like, well, wait a minute, why did this take 2 hours longer than the standard If you aren't armed with that information, you can't ask the question.

Well, and I think with a fleet, one of the biggest questions that comes up is from a customer is, why did you charge me $200 for an oil change?

Yeah.

When I can go down to Jiffy Lube and get it for $90 or whatever that cost is. I mean, that is the first thing that comes up when you're doing an outsource study is it's usually the preventative maintenance that comes up first. Because most people that drive a car have an idea what it costs to change their oil, right? Right. So that's the good thing about fleet is most of us are consumers. We know what it costs for 2 tires. We know what it costs for, you know, and so that's a good way for you as a customer or your customers if you're in a fleet to hold you accountable.

Well, and I think also, you know, we talk about using it as a quality control check for your internal technicians, you know, is helping them understand, you know, hey, if you are— if you've got an inspection and this should take you an hour and you're doing it in 50 minutes or you're doing it in 30 minutes, you're probably not taking enough time on that inspection. Or vice versa, it's taking you 2 hours. Okay, well, where did you spend— where did you really spend your time? Because it wasn't on the inspection, you know. Did you spend your time doing the repair? Because when you have that conversation about, hey, should we outsource, they need to be able to separate and see that you spent this much time doing the oil change, this much time on the inspection, but then you found, you know, like the, the, you know, the engine belt needed to be replaced. Well, that's a different job.

Yeah.

And you don't want that counting against your oil change numbers because it's going to make you look like you don't know what you're doing and your oil changes cost way more than it does at Jiffy Lube.

And if you have an older fleet, you're going to find more.

Yep.

So your average inspection times go higher if you commingle all those repairs.

Yeah. So, you know, spreading them apart, which then leads us to the question VMRS, which is obviously one of the things that we push and you recommend fleets adopting. Is that something that's required to implement standard repair times?

I don't think it's required, but I think it's desirable, if that makes sense, because Typically the way the VRMS codes are laid out is they're laid out by tasks, by parts and components. And so it's easy to align that with your parts room. It's easy to align that with each task, you know, based on the, the codes because it's kind of the language of Fleet. So you could go through it, especially if you're using all 9 digits, you know, you can go through and actually identify clear at a part level. What did it take me to change a brake caliper?

Right.

Or, you know, brake spring or something, you know, that's— so it's kind of important. It can become a lot of minutiae.

Very minutiae.

Yeah, because there's like 35,000 codes out there.

Grandpa would rail against us overcoding and underreporting.

Yes.

You know, that we're too focused on the codes and not enough on the data.

And I always recommend using the VRMS codes for your most frequent repairs or your most costly repairs.

Yep.

That way you're not getting too deep in the weeds.

Well, and I think the other thing too is when you look at that, you could go down to the detail of 9, but at least getting it to 6 and being able to separate out, like we mentioned, you know, the difference between your oil change, your inspection, and then, hey, we had to replace the engine belt. But then also based on the year, the year, the make, you know, how old is the vehicle? You mentioned that if it's an old vehicle in New England, it's going to be a lot different than a new vehicle in Phoenix. Yep. you know, just by nature of what it is.

Rust Belt versus Sunshine Country.

Yep. Salt on the roads. We don't do that out here in Phoenix, by the way, which means that our vehicles last a lot longer. And so if you ever buy a used vehicle— total segue— Phoenix is your market. I'll just tell you that right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Don't buy it from a flood zone.

Yeah.

A flood zone or the Rust Belt.

Snow zones. Those are no-go. But one of the things that I like to do is if you are getting into VMRS and you're doing VMRS standards and you're having, you know, that level of detail not over-detailed, not over-coded, but finding that balance. The other source you can use to find your own repair times is yourself.

Yeah.

And so one of the things that we push for our clients is, you know, use your own shop as a source, set a standard. You know, I know we've got a utility. I know there's other systems that do the same thing where you can actually pull reports based off of the class and the VMRS code. And you can get a report that tells you exactly what your repair, check, replace times are. And then you can feed that back into the system and you can say, hey, well, today we want to, you know, if our average time on a brake job is 1.5 hours, let's set the standard at either 1.5 or we'll set it at 1. And let's set the standard a little bit better than what we're doing today. So we improve incrementally. But using your own shop, then it's your fleet. Your mixed fleet, your skill set. It's not some crazy technician that knows Ford system in and out. It's, you know, your standards. And then you just try to improve incrementally. And so I like taking that approach too, is that you don't necessarily have to go out and hit the OEM standard or the Mitchell On Demand standard. You can set yourself as a standard repair time source.

Yeah. And you also, you don't have to buy any software like Mitchell On Demand. I mean, you can typically, if you have a good partnership with Ford, they may share those with you. I know when I was in the waste business, we asked all of our vendors to give them to us. And what they give you is all the warranty times, which is really the standard, right? Right. And so it's, it's something if you, if you build that relationship, you can get that information.

Yeah. So as you go through it and look at that, Steve, one of the things that you talk about with standard repair times is kind of what the target should be. I know Grandpa had a lot of opinions on this, but let's say that a shop, they go through the, the process, they get their standard repair time set. What should the target be for technicians against those standard repair times?

Well, when we were a fleet consulting company, when I worked for that, we were set— the target was, the benchmark was 90 to 110%. Um, but going back to your earlier question, they need to be accurate, otherwise it's useless. You don't want someone doing it too fast or too slow because then you got quality control in the balance there, right? So you need to make sure first and foremost they're accurate, whether they're your own source or whether they're a source that's commercial. And I know you had some comment about Ron Turley.

Oh, well, he had a— him and standards were very closely related, um, as in high standards. He had very high standards for everything he did. And so for him, it was always 60%. You know, if he had technicians coming in below or, you know, in between that 60 to 100%, he started getting worried. You know, he always wanted to make sure that his technicians were aiming high and always coming in, you know, what's the right word? How do you phrase that in the right way? Because he would always do it with the flip inverse of the math formula. Yeah, so instead of being 60% efficient, it was 140% efficient. Yeah, you know, where it was taking them 140% longer than the repair time. And the reason he did that is because he always wanted them aiming and always wanted them pushing and striving to get things out as quickly as possible because he was big on efficiency. That was his whole MO, was efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.

Which really brings you into the other aspect of quality control. You should have some kind of mechanism in place where you're, you're doing— I used to try and do random quality control inspections, right? It's, it's with each mechanic. I would pick maybe one a week or two a week, and, and that's something you can just walk around with them after they finish their job. If they're doing a preventative maintenance inspection, maybe I picked 10 items on the inspection list, 10 random items, and then so if they missed one of those 10, then you got a 90% score. Yep. Right, so you kind of put it in some kind of quantifier in there and then you counsel them and maybe the thing they miss, maybe they need more training on. Maybe they were just being laxatazical that day. You kind of try and drill into that so you can have later talk about these in your one-on-ones. When you're doing your one-on-ones, when you're doing your evaluations, when you're setting up your training for the next year, you want to know this information. If the guy fell short every time on suspension, you know, maybe he needed to go out and do some suspension or electrical or whatever that was. So it really gives you key insights on your mechanic abilities, your mechanic work, work habits, those kinds of things.

Well, another way to track that too would be like WeWorks, right? How many things came back in the shop after being fixed the first time that needed to be fixed again, or the fix wasn't correct, you know? And what was the reason for that? Was it something simple that should have been caught? Was, you know, did the technician pencil whip this or did they, you know, no, this was legit. We did a diagnostic. We thought that was the problem and we just have to try the next thing. You know, we definitely see that occasionally.

Yeah.

The last thing you want to see is you're sacrificing quality for the quantity just because you set the SRTs.

Well, I think that's critical too, because safety is in the balance as well.

It is. When you're talking about vehicles over on the road, I mean, it's critical.

And one of the things, you know, like what Grandpa would say, 60%, you got to remember the story that he always told, which was about his days at UPS and when he came up with that engine time-saving study. And as they watched the technician do it, I mean, that was a 12-hour SRT from the OEM. But as they realized, wow, there's a lot of inefficiencies in this process. Sometimes the SRT is the enemy where you could actually make the whole process a lot more efficient. Without sacrificing the quality. And so getting the SRTs is one thing, but then making sure that they're legitimate, that they actually make sense, and that there aren't problems in the process that are hurting your standard repair times versus a problem with quality or quantity.

And I think that's particularly relevant when you're doing inspections because every vehicle is laid out differently.

Yep.

So you really should have different inspection sheets if you want to be optimal about it, because you're walking in a sequence step by step And that's where your efficiencies come into play.

Yep.

Um, so that's something to take into consideration as you're doing that. That's probably the best place to process map is, is A, inspections, B, inspections, all those things.

Well, because you do those the most, right?

Yes.

You know, so that's where you're gonna get your efficiencies and you're gonna get the biggest bang for your buck just by doing time studies on those.

I was just thinking, we were talking about VRMS. I don't want to go backwards here, but I was talking to one of our clients on the phone who's converting over to the VRMS, and they had a particular problem with NOx sensors. You can't track a NOx sensor unless you go 9 digits. That's one of those areas where that sensor is actually in the last 3 digits of a VRMS. So that's where I say, you know, frequency, cost, things like that. If there may be some things you want to go past 6 digits. That may be one if you're having a problem. I remember when I did a tour with UPS years ago, they knew that they could get 200 knock sensor alerts before they had to change it, which was a phenomenally high number in my mind, but they had it down to that kind of an algorithm that they, they knew that they could just get through it, you know, give a reset itself basically. So Um, if you get to that level, I mean, UPS is phenomenal with this kind of data, you know. I know, like your grandpa always said, but they were phenomenal with that data.

Yeah, like efficiency was the name.

Oh, they blew me away when I went down toward that place.

And they definitely, if they had a quality problem, they felt that all the way up and down the supply chain, because if they didn't get a package where it needed to go, uh, it wasn't happening.

Yep.

You know, and that's like, it cost them a lot of money to make sure that that happened, you know, that it was delivered on time. But they were very big proponents of SRTs, standard repair times, and holding technicians to the same type of standard they held their drivers to.

Yep.

And that's where Grandpa learned all of it, was, you know, being a, being a driver. He— they didn't have standard repair times for drivers. He made his own. He said, hey, this should take you 8 hours. And what did he do? He did it in 6.

Yep.

And it's that type of— when you're looking at your standard repair times, trying to figure out where are the processes at that we could reduce our standard repair times. Even against what the OEM says and how can we improve ourselves without sacrificing the quality and having where all of a sudden our downtime's through the roof or our reworks are up. So, well, I think that'll wrap it up for us today. Thank you again for listening. As always, we've got the Fleet Success Summit coming up April 20th through 21st out in Mesa, Arizona. We did extend last week. We announced that we extended the January early bird registration discount through January. FleetSuccessSummit.com. Go out and register. We've got 12, 13 speakers, one stage, two days. It really is going to be awesome. Talking about things like this, talking about culture, talking about risk management. It's just, it's the conference to go to if you're a fleet manager, up-and-coming, established, whatever. Till then, We will see you next time.

Stay warm.

Absolutely. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @fleet_success. See you next time.