Episode 095: Mechanic Productivity

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Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. With your host Josh Turley and Jeff Jenkins.

Hey!

And Steve Saltzgiver.

Great to be back. Another good week.

So today we wanted to hit kind of a fun topic. I was watching some of Grandpa's seminars again. It's always fun to do, you know, every once in a while just to remember some of the basics that he used to teach about. And one of the first video seminars that he has is on mechanic productivity. And it's always baffled me, right? Like, you know, because I've had school professors and other fleet managers, they would always, you know, tell me, oh, your grandpa, like, he doesn't understand productivity. And I will agree, like, Grandpa didn't know, like, I don't think he understood the definition of what productivity really meant, you know, because like the way we define productivity in, you know, like in our system It was based on Grandpa's definition. It was like, hold on, that's not productivity, that's efficiency.

Right.

And so I've always been kind of like curious about like, wait a minute, what's the difference between the two? Um, and after getting into an argument with a college professor about it and being proved wrong, which was super fun by the way. Um, I was like, you know what, I'm gonna go figure this out and I'm gonna figure out how, like why it even matters. Like why people get so caught up in some of the academics. Um, And so I wanted to talk about what the difference is between productivity and efficiency, get that out of the way really quickly, and then let's move into like, how do we measure it and why does it matter to know the difference?

What's funny is that they like told you your grandpa didn't know what he's talking about and he still accomplished as much as he did.

Right. Like, does it really matter?

Yeah.

Yeah. But I do remember, like, I remember, you know, a fleet manager here locally, you know, was like, you don't know what you're talking about. That's not a measure of productivity. That's efficiency. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. You know, it is efficiency. Yeah, but there are two sides of the exact same coin, right? And, and really you use one to measure the other. And so we found this, this really fun example, you know, for those of you who don't know, like productivity is, it's really about the output, right? And it's not necessarily about the input. And so, you know, when you're measuring productivity, it's about how much work are you producing in a given period of time. Right, with or, you know, based on a given input. Whereas efficiency is what's the ratio of useful work performed compared to the effort taken, right? You're like, well, okay, that doesn't make any sense. I don't get it. Like, why? I don't think you said anything different there, Josh. And I'm like, I get you, I understand. Let's put it this way. This was a great example. Steve found this one. He says, uh, if the power output from a car engine could be increased and it doesn't use any more fuel, right? So we're— let's say we're at 400 horsepower and, you know, and we're on— gosh, how would they even measure that? You know, units of fuel, so grams of fuel per rotation. Okay, right. Or per horsepower would probably be the right way to say that. If that— if the power of the car can go up and it doesn't need to use any more fuel, then it's more productive, right? It's got more output for the same amount of input. But if the power output were to remain the same but it uses less fuel, then it's more efficient, right? Like, we can't make it more powerful, but we can make it more efficient. It'll actually— it'll use less fuel. but I can't put in any more power. And that's just more efficient. And so sometimes we get confused between the two and we think they're the same thing because they really are. They're just looking at it from a different perspective.

Right?

You ever see that picture where like one guy is standing there and he's like, it's a 9 and the other guy's looking at it, it's a 6. Yeah. Right. And they're just looking at it from two different angles. I think that's kind of productivity versus efficiency. The reason why I think it matters to know the difference is because sometimes you can't get any more productive, right? Like, there's not any more work that you can go out and do. There's not any more, you know, like, for example, Grandpa was like, one of the things he did to really set himself apart, and it really set him on the trajectory to taking over UPS's fleet, the first thing he was was a driver, and he was a delivery manager, right? And in his truck, it was a confined amount of space, and they got as many packages as they could get on there. And they would assign that route and they would give it to him and say, okay, that's your day's worth of packages, right? And, you know, it was expected that he would go out and do that in 8 hours. They couldn't put more packages on the truck because there was no more space, right? So he could know— he couldn't be more productive no matter how hard he tried, right?

Right.

Because there's no more packages that he could deliver in a single day. But what he was able to do is those same 8 hours worth of packages, he's able to become more efficient and he was able to finish in 6 hours, right? And so his whole thing was, you know, like, hey, how do I fix my processes, do all this stuff? Because I can't do— I can't get more packages on the truck, so I have to get more efficient so I can do it in less time. Now, if he would have gotten super efficient and maybe he could have done it in 4 hours, maybe he could have gone back and gotten a second load or gotten more into that cubic volume of space. So sometimes—

Or they would do what I see UPS trucks doing now. They tow trailers.

Yeah, I saw my first UPS trailer in LA a couple weeks ago. It blew my mind. I was like, there you go. That's how you do it, right? And so there you go. That's— Steve, that's actually a great example, is they had to expand the capacity of the truck in order to become more productive, right? Like they had to do, right? Even though it was the same truck, same driver, They didn't increase any of those inputs, but now that driver can, you know, like they have more packages, more capacity to do more work. Um, and so the reason why I think this matters is when we look at things like, uh, you know, our tech efficiencies and things like that within the shop, um, we can save time and do all that, right? But if we don't put it back to work, we're not any more productive than we were before. We're just faster at doing it.

Right.

Grandpa still only delivered a truck's worth of packages in a single day, but he just did it with 2 hours to spare. So he used less fuel, he used less input, so it was a lot more efficient. But it was— it didn't get any more packages delivered that day.

Yeah, but so what did they do with the other 2 hours?

Uh, nothing. Like, okay, well, I mean, so there you go, you missed the productivity. That's the productivity route.

You go home early, right?

Yeah, that's all. Instead, go home early. And, you know, but because, like, he was able to then take that and then they applied it across at scale, and then they were able to recap some of those extra hours because now I could put more drivers on routes. I can, you know, bring a vehicle home, or maybe I could reschedule, and now I could do 2 drivers per day or 2 runs per day instead of just 1 8-hour day. Now I could do like 2 12-hour days, so I've only increased by 4 hours. But I've got double the productivity. Right. Okay. And so that's something to think about, right, as we're in fleets and maybe our fleet size isn't increasing.

Right.

And like there's fixed constraints. Maybe we don't have a bigger shop, we don't have a bigger parts room, we don't have, you know, like there's constraints that we usually run into and you might not be able to do any more work. And I think fleet managers are like, there's always more work. Yeah, yeah. You can always find more stuff to do. Um, but there does come a point where, you know, if we, if we don't have more to do, like let's say we've only got, you know, 10 PMs to do in the day, you can't just go make another PM come do, right? So we need to understand the difference between productivity and efficiency for just that reason, is just understanding that we, if we're efficient but we don't turn that efficiency into productivity, then it's lost, right? And that we don't have any productivity gains that way. And sometimes we may need to do that. We may need to add a trailer to the truck so we have— we can take advantage of that efficiency. Because had Grandpa had a trailer, he could have done more packages, right?

Equate this to a shop. I was going to say, if you equate this to a shop, that's where the standard repair times can come into play. I mean, if you have a really experienced technician mechanic and they have 8 hours of work that's assigned to them, but they do it in 6 hours, they're actually efficient for that day, right?

Yep.

Or they get paid more.

Yeah.

For the, uh, the extra effort where their experience kicks in. Yeah.

If they're able to, you know, it depends on what do they do with the extra 2 hours, right? Do they take on another job that would make them more productive, right? And so efficiency turns into productivity that way. But if they don't do anything with the extra 2 hours, you know, they go home early, you know, are they paid the same? Are they flat rate?

Is—

are they doing like shop cleanup or something else, you know? There are other things they could be doing, but if they're not turning that into more action, then it's, you know, it's a lost efficiency gain.

Yes.

So, which is crazy because both of these words and their definitions by themselves would equal success. Yeah, right. So you can be very, very efficient at something, but that doesn't necessarily— you're having the, the proper productivity, right?

Because productivity is all about the output. It's the outcome.

It is.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's like, so talking about this, a little mind-blowing, right? Because I would say if you told me, hey, that guy's really, really efficient, I would think success.

Yeah.

If he's very, very productive, success, right? However, you cannot be successful by having one and not the other.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah.

So with that in mind, I guess Grandpa wasn't as crazy as my college professor thinks he was. You know, he might have, might have confused the two terms, but he definitely understood that there was a huge relationship between, you know, productivity and efficiency. So much so that like when he talks about saving UPS $100 million, he usually put it in terms of this, like it wasn't that he saved them $100 million, is that they actually, they grew the size of their fleet without hiring any more mechanics. That is productivity gains, right? Because they had more jobs, more to do, they had more fleet with the same resources, right? And that's a— you know, he improved UPS mechanic productivity, not just, you know, but he did that by making them super efficient, and then they were able to add work and add capacity.

So he had both.

Yeah, and there are ways to increase your productivity without necessarily becoming more efficient.

Well, yeah, you could add more hours. I mean, there's—

well, and not even necessarily more hours, but there's, you know, like you could do, um, you know, going back to the example of like more power, same fuel, right? You could, you know, like he would do, you know, uh, switch everything from manual ratchets to, you know, using impact drivers and things like that. Okay. It's faster, but you can also do more, right? If like for every hour you can pump out more, you know, like you could fasten more fasteners.

Yeah, but I would call that efficiency, not productivity.

Ah, see, but it depends on how you're measuring it. It's the same.

I think that's where technology really comes into play too, Josh. Yeah, I mean, I remember in the old days we didn't have diagnostic equipment. We had to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the problem was. Now all you do is plug in a diagnostic piece of equipment, tells you what it is. Now you're a whole lot more efficient than we used to be.

Yeah, right.

So those are the kind of things technology does. Same with GPS and everything else that we're seeing.

Well, and more productive technology, right? Because you're, you're doing the work that needs to be, right? Because how many times, if you didn't have a diagnostic tool, how many times do you see it where you, you, people throw parts at the issue, right? Yeah. And they just try to fix it and they try to see what's going on. Then it comes back in and you got to do the same work over again, right? That's completely unproductive. You might be really efficient at, well, hey, my repair time, I thought it was a water pump, so I switched it out and I was efficient in my way that I replaced that water pump. But did I fix the issue? No. Then you weren't productive, right? Steve, I'm going to do you one because I know you really wanted to talk about ChatGPT and how awesome that is. Right, right. But like, that's a productivity increase, right? For, you know, it— like, if I am— let's say I'm a, I'm a person and I want to write blog posts. Well, I could write a blog post and maybe I could get one done in an hour, right? But now I've got ChatGPT.

Yeah, absolutely.

And now I can actually prove that today, right?

I think I wrote about 3 of them.

Oh man. But now you could do one in 10 minutes, right? And so now instead of your, your capacity working as efficiently as you could typing, you could only ever do— right, you were at max efficiency, you could do maybe 8 a day.

Yeah, right.

But now with the power of like a tool or something like that, now I could do, oh, what's 8 times 4? 32 a day. All right, like if it took me 15 minutes now to do one, you know, now I could do 4 per hour. Now I'm more efficient, but if I only still only did the 8, I'm not any more productive. But if I did 32, now I'm more productive. And I'm— and am I doing the same?

The beauty of AI, Josh, is it learns who you are.

Yeah, so it gets faster.

It mimics your style. Yeah.

So now that we got all the academic stuff out of the way and you guys are fully versed in the difference between productivity and efficiency and why You can focus on efficiency all you want, but if you don't make it more productive, you've wasted your time. Let's talk about things that hurt, ultimately, that hurt productivity. Because, you know, that's really what, you know, like, we're going to talk and call it more productivity. We're not going to call it efficiency because efficiency is just, it's a way to become more productive, but it's not by itself more productive. So things that hurt productivity. In fleet?

There's a lot of them.

There's a ton. And these are all things that, you know, like Grandpa made it his mission to eliminate. You know, as we coach people, as we consult with people, we're trying to help expose, you know, different things that are productivity saboteurs that keep you from going out and doing the things that you need to focus on.

Yep.

Right.

So the single biggest— I'm just going to give the single biggest right now—

yep—

is You'll say in general distractions, but cell phones.

Yes. I think for every, every worker, no matter what job you're in, fleet, white collar, blue collar, like cell phones are a huge productivity killer. The amount of time we spend, you know, and they used to say this about TV.

Yeah.

TV was a total— and it still is, right? But, uh, the cell phones have definitely taken the place as the number one time waster. Distraction in America today. Yep, without a doubt. So I've got a whole slew of stuff. We're gonna put this on another episode. Okay, ways to minimize the distraction of your phone. So I've got some awesome tips that I got from a colleague of mine, things like making it grayscale and turning off notifications and locking yourself out of your phone and turning off different apps. Like, it's— I got some tips.

We'll go into it.

Yeah, that's good.

All right, so stay tuned for that one.

Yeah.

Um, I know one of Grandpa's big one was delays in process, right? There's bad sequencing. Yeah, sequencing kills. If you've got a bad sequence, it doesn't matter what the process is, bad sequencing will kill productivity, uh, because usually it's, it's like throwing sand, you know, in whatever you're trying to do. Um, and so like he would do things, you know, like with the circle inspection or his, his whole time study, uh, it wasn't an effort problem. Right. And that's something for you guys listening to really understand this. And this is why we talk about productivity versus efficiency. You can have a tech who's just putting in the effort and really grinding and sweating, and they're as productive as they can be, but their process is broken and the process is causing them to be less productive than they could have been. And, and that's inefficient, right? It's an inefficient use of their effort.

We actually have a real-time scenario happening as we speak with all these supply chain distractions that we have. Can you imagine how that has impacted productivity and efficiency? I mean, just in my own life, just trying to get a car fixed now or get a repair done or recall done, it's weeks because nobody has any parts. Yeah, it's a disaster. I was talking about that on my LinkedIn page and I got a lot of comments from fleet managers that it's, it's a complete disaster out there trying to maintain a fleet. They've had to add more vehicles, they've had to add more mechanics. So that shows you the downside of all this that we were talking about up front in this podcast.

Yeah. Uh, so you're gonna have things like bad sequencing. You mentioned it, you know, the mechanics are getting hit by this. Uh, wrong parts, wrong tools, you know, just the parts room being a mess. You had, uh, I think my favorite example from Grandpa was UPS wouldn't let them use ratchets, air ratchets, right? Um, you know, even though they used air ratchets at the OEM. So they, they approved the use, they wouldn't let them use impacts. And so they had to use a 3/8-inch air ratchet. But even when they could use the air ratchet, they didn't have enough tooling.

Back then when ratchets came out, though, impact wrenches, people were— they didn't have any attention to torque.

It was just full-on, right?

But he would talk about how they didn't have enough air hoses, they didn't have enough You know, ratchets. They didn't have it. You know, every time the tech would go, somebody would steal whatever tools he was using and he'd have to go find them and bring them back, right? So they didn't have proper tooling in the shop. You know, things like you go into most shops today and we look for things like air hoses coming down from in the bays. We look for, you know, oil fill hoses in the bays. You know, things that they didn't used to have back then. Those are all efficiency gains that hopefully make us more productive, right? That means we can do more PMs in a day, right? Kind of thing.

Staging parts.

Yeah.

Parts kits near the preventive maintenance bays. Things like shadow boards where you use common tools and you have them staged by the bays, you know, with the— so you know if a tool is missing or it's walked off somewhere.

Yeah. Grandpa used to always run into this. I always laughed every time he told me, but he'd say, listen, Turley, And, uh, he would talk about the, um, you know, like the resistance. He would have foremen, he'd go in and consult.

Yeah.

And you'd have foremen that would, you know, we don't need to measure this, you just got big brother watching us and all this.

Oh yeah.

So resistance, you get rebellion, you get that kind of stuff. Like, that's— those are productivity killers, you know, because anytime you want to streamline a process or do that, who's going to be in your way? Those guys. Right.

So, well, but not just like those guys, but then what those guys are doing seeps.

Yep.

To everybody else.

Yep. That's a whole different culture discussion. Yeah. Uh, you got understaffing issues, not having enough techs, you know, like everybody's facing that right now. Uh, but because you don't have enough techs, I mean, you want to talk about— they could be as efficient as possible, but again, like, you can make your pro— your shop floor perfect, you can make your technology perfect, you can have the perfect technician, right, with the perfect knowledge and training, and yet you can't be more productive because why? Because you only have one tech.

You don't have it.

You don't have enough of them. Yep, right. And that's the difference. You know, efficiency is a great way to get more out of what you have. Productivity is how do you get more out of more, right? Um, you know, we talk about like, speaking of training, maybe you've got the wrong tech on the wrong, on the wrong job. You know, this tech doesn't understand how to do those jobs, and so they, you know, it takes them a lot longer to do a brake job or do an inspection or something like that. Um, you know, underallocation of jobs. Boy, this would be an awesome, awesome thing to do, but not having enough jobs for the techs you have in staff. You know, I don't think I've ever seen that one.

Yeah, it's— that's not reality, right?

That's alternate reality.

Total pipe dream.

That's part of the multipliers.

Happens all the time, guys.

But think about sometimes, you know, maybe as a foreman, if we're not giving the techs the jobs to do or we're not scheduling it correctly, that could lead to wasted time as they're sitting around waiting for work.

Yeah, that's, and that's what I would call out, right? Are you like pre-assigning jobs before they become available, right?

Uh, or if you're waiting until the morning shift, like, hey, 6 AM rolls around and they don't have their first job in hand until 6:15. Like, that's a sequencing issue, but it's also a you're not allocating the jobs correctly, right? Because they're just sitting around waiting for stuff. And then all those things are obviously—

it's a great list of that, Josh, if you use the VRMS codes. Yeah, the indirect labor lists all these time wasters, all these things that hurt productivity, right?

And so that's, you know, as you start measuring inefficiencies, like looking at your indirect versus direct ratio, um, because ultimately what is productivity for a, for fleet shop, it's the direct time on the, on the work, on doing the work of the vehicle, managing a vehicle. And the indirect to direct would show you how much time do you spend doing things like shop cleanup, or non-value-add activities is what we call them, versus the actual work that is driving productivity in the shop, you know, the outcomes that we're trying to drive. Um, I love one of my favorite things that he would say in this video. And he talks about, you know, listen, Turley— he said that so many times— listen, Turley, do you want quality or do you want efficiency? And because people would kick back on them all the time, you'd say, hey, you can— you need to do faster, you need to go faster. And they would push and say, we can't, you know, like, if we go faster, we're going to miss stuff, we're, you know, we're going to have poor quality.

Yeah.

He says, right, but inefficiency— efficiency is quality. Like those are the same. Because if you have quality issues, you're no longer efficient, you know. And I kind of mentioned this, it's like maybe, you know, you throw parts at it and like, well, this time I'm gonna replace the, the water pump, and you know, I could do that job really fast. But if you have a job that you don't do all the way and that vehicle comes back in the shop and has to be done again, you've now just doubled the, the amount of time for that one job. Because you didn't add— you're not doing a second job, you're doing the same job again. Right? So anytime you have to redo work, it's 100% inefficient, 100% unproductive. And so when we talk about quality, quality is efficiency.

Well, and if you have a process in place, you shouldn't have to sacrifice the quality, right?

So, yeah, training, you know, like those just adds to inefficiencies when you have people that don't know how to do the job or don't know how to do things. So I went through it as I was listening to this. It just honestly was like, man, you know, it's been— I think he recorded these seminars in 1997. So we're coming up on a few years. Yeah, I mean, it's 25 years. We're almost coming up, you know, 25 years. And he's still taking me to school.

Just listen, Turley.

Listen, Turley, you better get your stuff straight. But he had a ton of tips and just how to better manage your time. You know, something like he had no idea the distraction that mobile devices would cause. He passed away in 2011, so, you know, the iPhone had just barely been out, what, in 2008? Yeah, you know, he was still using his old flip phone, Nokia.

So if he saw today, he'd be flipping his shit.

Oh yeah, but he told this story and he talked about, you know, back then he'd walk around, and this is a first tip, right, for fleet managers. You want to know how to, you know, eliminate time wasters? MBWA, management by walking around. That's true, right? Like, you got to walk around, you got to understand what's going on, who's doing what. And he says the second thing is you got to know how long the jobs take. Uh, standard repair times are a great way to do that, but I haven't seen a standard repair time for a parts entry clerk or data entry clerk, right?

Good point.

So he told the story about when he was in the shop, um, they always assumed they had a data entry clerk and they thought this person, that he was just busy all the time because he had a stack of work orders probably 3 inches thick and that stack never seemed to get lower than 3 inches. Um, and Grandpa's looking at, he's like, there's no way, there's no way this takes that long to do. And, you know, like, I get it back then and, you know, this is the '90s, techs hadn't quite adopted computers and so some of them were doing the hunt and peck. This was not that person. Right? This is a white-collar person, knew how to type, knew how to do all that, and he had seen them working, and so he knew they could move pretty quick. And so, you know, he just had this hunch. He was like, there's something off here. So he's watching, you know, as the person's kind of doing it. It looks like they're very busy on the computer, and so he just kind of sneaks up behind the computer, and then he comes around the corner, right? And before they can close the window, what do you think he sees?

Solitaire.

Solitaire, the game of games, right? And he says they're just in there playing solitaire. And, and because everybody knew—

when I was early in my career, there was a guy that was always— everybody thought he was the most productive guy in the shop, and he walked around all day with a hammer and a screwdriver tapping on stuff. And so he looked like he was busy all 8 hours, but he didn't accomplish jack.

Right. Well, maybe he was super efficient at tapping hammers, right? But it's just not very productive because it doesn't move the needle on the business. But his, his point, that whole illustration was knowing how long the job should take. And Steve, your point actually illustrates this too. Nobody understood how long it should take for a data entry clerk to put in a work order. And because of that, they weren't measuring the outputs and saying, wow, this person should be able to enter 100 work orders a day. And then raising an alarm when they were only doing 20, right?

Can't manage if you can't measure.

And if in this case, you know, Steve is there going around tapping the thing, if they just ask, well, how long should that job take? Hopefully the very next question they would have asked is, why are we doing that job, right? And going back to the quality issue, doing a job well that's not worth doing is the same as not doing a job well at all. Yeah, you know, because that job's not having an impact or it's a waste of time. And this is where status quo gets into— gets you into trouble. It's because you'll have processes that you put in 10 years ago and they're just not relevant anymore, but yet we keep doing them and keep maintaining them. So you've always got to be looking at that and really understanding not just how long a job takes, but why the job is important. I mean, that's, you know, time management tip for you on that side. Oh man, there's so many notes I took from this one. You know, employee effort, having the proper tooling. We talked about organization. He was really big on shadowboxing, you know, making sure that every tool had a shadow frame, that it, you know, it had a spot to go to. Uh, putting away your tools when you were done. You know, a lot of people don't do that, but there's a really big piece of being more efficient because what's the one thing— you ever go out to your garage?

All the time, right?

And because you didn't put it back in the right spot, or worse, like your kids didn't put it back in the right spot— more accurate Right, more accurate. You don't know where to go and you're like, where is that screwdriver? Where's my drill?

I'm always asking, dude, where's this at?

It was hanging up right here. Where's the battery? Like, I know the batteries all go here. And so if your, your tool room is organized, your parts room is organized, that is huge. And you know, like Steve, you talk about 5S, that's a huge efficiency improvement, right? Just organizing your stuff. Um, you know, we have a saying here at RTA is like You know, one of the things we do to help people is we help fleets keep their shit together. And organization, that's right there. Get your shit together, guys.

It's a big one. So like, it really is.

Um, I keep thinking about, um, how much time's wasted in my case charging my iPad and my iPhone because I can never find a charger cord because I've got kids. You know, I swear when these kids grow up and I get out of the house, they'll, uh, I'm going to find a pile of cords somewhere.

They're going to be buried in your backyard.

Maybe the dog's dragged them out.

Yeah, right. Uh, so looking at other things, you know, we talk about minimum of interruptions, right? How many techs work on a single job? That was actually something I didn't think about. Usually you're looking at, um, you know, do you have too many techs assigned to one job or something like that? But if you look at a work order and you can see that you know, like there's a bunch of stops and starts, you know, this tech worked on it for 2 hours, then another tech worked on it for 2 hours, then another tech worked on it. Every time that it switches from one tech to another is not just context switching cost, but what's the word, like acclimation, right? They have to figure out what the other tech did, catch up to what they were doing, and then pick up that train of thought. And hopefully you've got good notes so that that's easier. But if they have to come in and try to reassess the situation, then they're going to re-diagnose. There's a lot of wasted time if you have to switch jobs between techs, right? And they usually happen if you've got like a swing shift or a night shift or something like that, and the job doesn't get done in the allotted time. There's going to be lost time if there's not a good transfer process, transfer of knowledge. So doing good notes—

the other thing too is quality can suffer, Josh.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, think about your story.

Right.

Yeah, like I always remember your story in the, um, you know, putting in the— what was it, you had a bushing or something like that for the tie rod?

Oh yeah, tie rod. Yeah, yeah. One of the only time I got written up is in my whole life was when I allowed— I asked somebody, okay, take over. All you need to do is torque the tie rod bolt and put the cotter pin in there. Never happened. Bus tire falls off.

Whoops.

You know. Now we got a road call. Could have killed people. We were lucky it didn't do anything. But think of it, you know, things could happen if you're not very, very careful.

Yeah, but you had an interruption, right? Somebody pulled you off the job, you had to go do something else, and you gave it to somebody. And whenever you see that on a work order, that's always a— hey, there's a time management gain that we could grab right here, right? It was just continuity of work. Um, you know, parts availability, tracking your stockouts. How many times does the tech need a part and it's not there? And like, now you've got a vehicle you can't finish the job because it's waiting on a part. That's a, you know, especially right now, that's a big indicator, you know, not just in efficiency, but that's going to hurt your productivity. Steve, how many, how many, what percentage when you do consulting projects and you're looking at the number of lines that have an SRT, what's your goal for like how many of those lines should have an SRT?

I would say 70 to 80%, you know, at least most of your common jobs, preventive maintenance for sure. Yeah, but you can all warranty work if you're doing it yourself or you have someone doing it. You can monitor with SRTs. Yeah, common things like, you know, brake, brake pad changes. I mean, in actuality, every single task, repair task, has an SRT somewhere if you go to the standard repair manual, because the SRTs are usually created for warranty maintenance.

Yep.

Because that's what the dealers use it for. That way they know how much to pay, how much they're losing, um, in their warranty if something, um, is deficient or breaks down.

Yeah, well, and they'll use that for flat rate work too, right? You know, because they'll compare those two and make sure that they're being profitable. Um, and I, I would tell you too, in like in our system, there's no reason you couldn't have 100%, you know, it maybe not the SRTs from the OEM but you could absolutely get an estimated time on what that job should take based on your fleet, your, your techs and your classes.

Yeah. But wouldn't you say if you're always hitting 100% though, that it is too high?

I don't know. Not hitting 100%.

Yeah.

But that 100% of the jobs have an estimate.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, maybe back when grandpa was like, everything was pencil, like they had to do it all on pen and paper. I could see 50% lower percentages, right? Or you're just not using them at all.

Right.

But today with technology, like, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to have 100% of your jobs with an estimated time pre-assigned. Agreed. You know, to track the efficiency. You know, if it's a 5-hour job, are you doing it in 5, 6, 4? How long is it taking you to do against what the estimated time of that job was?

Right.

So, well, if you have a good fleet information system, —by VRMS code, it's going to catalog those times. Yeah. Based on historical workflow. And, you know, it gives you at least a baseline to assign that mechanic. If he meets it and over time the average improves, then you're becoming more efficient, right? Yep.

And I'd say those times are probably even better to use as a tool because it is your shop, your fleet, your techs, your processes. You know, it's not, it's not some Ford shop with a Ford-trained tech, uh, or, you know, a tech who has to know how to work on Chevys and Fords and Toyotas all in the same day. Um, you know, so that's actually what I tell everybody.

Yours are more important than anybody's.

Yours are more important than anybody else's, right? The SRTs are a good standard, right? Like if you were going to go across North America. Uh, but if you're, you know, a shop out here in the, in the West, like you're not dealing with the same rusty bolts that the guys up north are dealing with. Yeah. So, you know, and honestly, maybe like this is my, one of my favorite examples is let's say that like here locally, maybe the city of Buckeye has a better replacement program than city of Goodyear. Right. I don't know if this is true, but if they did, that means that the techs in city of Buckeye are working on newer vehicles with less corrosion and less issues than city of Goodyear. And it might, the only difference might've been their procurement. Right? Like their, their purchasing agency, their city manager, their city council might have made a different decision and the fleet manager has no control over that. So how are you going to compare yourself to the same SRT, right? You need to use your own estimated times based on your history, your techs, your shop, your city, your fleet, because maybe your average age of fleet is 8 years and theirs is 3. That's totally different workflows and scheduling and estimated times.

So how often should people be looking at SRTs per job to adjust?

Annually at least. Yeah. And if you've got a good FMIS system, you should be able to do that. If you wanted to do it monthly, you should be able to. Right. But I would at least do annually. So because usually you get like a new model year.

One of our pillars of fleet success. Yeah. SRTs, efficiency, productivity. Those are perfect discussions to have in your one-on-one. That you do with your mechanics.

Yeah. Uh, Jeff, you mentioned something, you're like, well, if 100% of techs are hitting SRTs— so that is the second half of that, which is get your lines with 100% of SRTs on them and then measure your efficiency against those times. Um, and this is where, yeah, like Grandpa and Steve, you guys have a lot different opinions on, on how often you should be hitting that. But if 100% of your techs are meeting the SRT then your SRT is too high. You know, like, it's, it's probably a little bit too high and you need to bring that down, right? Uh, he would always shoot for, like, 50%. Wow. Because you figure if 50% of your techs are hitting it, that means 50% of your techs aren't. It's right down the middle. It's the average. Yeah, I mean, I guess, right? Uh, but I've seen others that—

well, I mean, it's like everything else, you should try to continually improve, right?

Um, I wouldn't be surprised today if he's like, yeah, because he always tells that story of going from the 12-hour job down to 6. Yeah, he's like, but as far as I'm concerned, if we had had the perfect tech and the perfect shop and the perfect vehicle, whatever, we could have gotten that job done in 4 hours. Oh geez, you cut the job by 50%, you're like, you really need another 2 hours on top of that? But that was just, you know, he's never satisfied, right? And so as you're doing your estimated time, same thing, just don't be satisfied, you know. And if 50% is too high for you crank it down, get it down to 30. You know, like you have an 80/20 rule. Might even be the rule here where 20% of your techs are just cranking and they're meeting those times, and the other 80% are trying to catch up to them.

Um, yeah, and this is in the vein of like creating more efficiency, right, and productivity. You're not doing this because you're trying to call people out. You're doing it to try and see how you can help them improve.

Yeah. Or just move faster or fix a process or something like that. Yeah, definitely. It's, you know, do not use the estimated times as a punitive measure. You want to use it as a coaching tool. So, yep, that's— I still got more notes, but I think that's going to do it for us on this episode. Just from one video, right? And I think I got like maybe 20 minutes into watching this thing and that was some of the takeaways. Really? Oh yeah.

Holy— you know, I've never seen any of those.

Golden nuggets. Yeah, they're awesome. That's pretty cool. So that's going to do it for us today. But if you want to learn more about this and other lessons like it, you can read the Fleet Success Playbook. We've got second editions back in stock. So if you want a copy of that, happy to send those out. Go ahead and you can send us an email over at podcast@rtafleet.com. And what we'd really love is to see you guys out at the Fleet Success Summit. That is March 21st, 22nd. At the Luxor Las Vegas. You can go to fleetsuccesssummit.com, go get registered. We'd love to see you guys out there. We got 12 different speakers talking about things like efficiencies, risk management, building an attentional culture, and how to have really awesome, you know, hiring so you get those good techs that can meet the SRT times 100% of the time. Absolutely. 100% of the time works 60% of the time. Other than that, I think that's going to do it for us today. Perfect. Thanks, Turley. Listen, next time, take it easy.

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