THE PROBLEM

Most dealers have had to put up with poor shop scheduling and loading. Almost every system being marketed to dealers does a lousy job and this has hindered service managers’ ability to successfully turn their shop labor inventory. In my 26 ½ years working in a dealership, we had tried many of the traditional scheduling and loading tools with limited success.  

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I’d say 90% of the problem is due to the way these systems work.  What I mean is they don’t schedule work to the next available technician that has the skill to do the work.  All of the work would come in unassigned and the advisors, dispatchers or team leaders would have to assign the job and hope that the assigned techs had time to look at the job that day.  Many jobs were not looked at until 2-3 days later.  Asking advisors to “buy more time” at write up because the job was scheduled wrong created CSI time bombs. Just as big and more costly was the problem when techs would run out of work in the middle of the day because we had not scheduled enough work in their skill area.  Ironically, both of these problems would occur simultaneously everyday in our shop and from what I’ve discovered in shops across America. And that’s why we created ShopLoader.