The Prognosis For Diagnosis

For every business there are items that you can hold in stock and you can sell them at any time. Tyres, wheels, exhausts, batteries, all can be sold off the shelf. If you don’t sell them today you can sell them tomorrow.

For some businesses their stock in trade is time. The hotel trade doesn’t sell rooms, it sells time. The rooms will always be there, but they are each allocated time which they sell.

The problem with selling time is that you can only sell it once. The fast fit operator – indeed any garage operator – has the same difficulty which we call ramp time. Fast fits may not actually sell the ramp time, but every minute the ramps are not occupied by vehicles undergoing profitable work the option to sell work on that ramp is vanishing down the plughole of time.

Most service managers recognise this and try to minimise the time vehicles spend on the ramps. Buyers will ensure that the exhausts they buy have a problem-free fitting procedure. In the efficient garage, time management is everything.

However, even with the best time management of jobs there is, for many depots, the point where the work being done fails to fill all the available time.There can be three outcomes to this. The first, and most likely, is that the time allocated to the job is stretched to fill the time available.

We all recognise the scenario – we take our car to the garage for a repair – the garage is devoid of customers, four mechanics sit reading the newspaper – it takes all day to do the job. On another day we arrive and the cars are lined up outside the doors. The same job is done in an hour.

The second outcome is that the jobs are carried out as efficiently as possible and the ramps lie ready for their next customer. This may well be a better practice than the first, but it doesn’t sell the time when the ramps are not in use. The third option is to find another profit centre which will see the ramps in use.

Since we are in the wheel and tyre business there is a tendency to keep the business revolving around the four corners of the car – brakes and shock absorbers are the most popular additional parts’ areas for fast fits. Skill levels required are relatively low, so labour costs remain low. The parts are often, though not always, fast fit.

Pull off the old and fit the new. Some have dabbled in so-called fast fit clutch operations – but fast fit is all relative. If someone drives in with a Ford Mondeo or a Transit and asks for a fast fit clutch they may think your fast fit description is stretching the realms of credibility.

Further, your mechanic’s time with the vehicle on the ramps – possibly special ramps – ties that bay up and, again, you can only sell your time once.There are, of course, other options; basic servicing is only a short step from fast fit work, though your reputation depends upon the skills of your mechanics. Can you afford to pay a mechanic rate to someone who may spend most of his time as a tyre fitter? MoT bays are yet another option.

Both MoT bays and service operations can be used to open doors to enhanced tyre, exhaust, and accessory sales. However, there is one profit centre which may well be worth considering as a development to ensure those ramps are never left empty.As one commentator told T&A, “without diagnostics all the service garages are going to be left with are tyres and exhausts.

” That statement should send shivers down the spine of every fast fit operator in the country. If the service garages are being forced to move into tyres and exhausts in a big way in order to retain their revenue, that must ultimately have a detrimental effect on the wellbeing of the fast fit depot – dragging revenues down..