Scheduling by WIP, Why is so important.

Scheduling in the modern collision shop is not what it used to be. How do you manage vehicles towed in that where not on your schedule, weeks with mostly type 1 repairs than next week mostly type3 repairs.

You can no longer bring in all the cars on a Monday with hopes to get them done by Friday.

Scheduling by wip takes the brain damage away from looking at individual cars and concentrating on what’s important, a consistent flow of work. Too little work and their is no sense of urgency, too much work and you cant touch every vehicle in a timely fashion,.

How to calculate the perfect balance of work.

Lets say your shop has a goal of $500,000 in sales per month and you average cycle time is 10 days with an average of 22 working days in a month. That’s a lot of numbers but it gets easier from here. We take 22 dived by 10 it gives our WIP turn rate of 2.2 times. This is an ok number, not great but ok. A great shop can turn WIP 6 plus times a month, but lets start simple and have a realistic goal of historically what we have done, 2.2

Now we take our sales goal of $500,000 dived by our WIP turn rate of 2.2 and wind up with a daily work in process daily goal of $227K.

In OnBoard Scheduler once you know your daily WIP goal, the scheduler will predict where to bring in your next job to keep your daily WIP goal at $227K. Once you start managing your daily WIP you will be amazed on how much smoother your collision center operates. The next step would be to increase your WIP turn goal from 2.2 to 2.5, that takes our cycle time from an average of 10 days down to 9. Every time our cycle time gets better, everyone is happier, sales go up, rental cost go down, insurance companies are happier, techs are making more money, everyone wins.