randy 77zt Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 (edited) http://jimroal.com/repair.html I used to work as a ford dealer tech for many years.This article is the truth.So you young guys that see the tech school commercials read up befroe going $30k in debt. http://www.martindale.com/appellate-practice-law/article_Fisher-Phillips-LLP_1702562.htm Some good news maybe? Edited May 25, 2013 by randy 77zt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevilZX Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 Currently working as a Ford dealer tech. A lot of this is true. I work in a smaller area so there isn't a lot of crookedness at all but people do fire the "parts cannon" (as we call it) a lot. They usually aren't around for long. That second article shows some promise. My shop will allow us to flag time for a lot of non-repair tasks but we generally don't do that because we would rather be working on a guest vehicle. Keeping fingers crossed for some good news down the road for flat-rate techs... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam280Z Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 Although I do almost all of my own wrenching, I'm lucky to have a shop that does not operate in the conventional manner. This is the only shop that I recommend to friends and family. http://www.agcoauto.com/content/AGCO_Business_Philosophy Sam Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Snailed Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 ^ That's a pretty neat business model for auto repair. Too bad that's not the standard. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevilZX Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 Oh how I would love to work for or own/operate a business that follows this model. One question about it though. Although they make a point to show that they charge actual time and compare it to flat-rate when performed quicker, do they then charge the guest more if the job takes longer than book time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam280Z Posted May 25, 2013 Share Posted May 25, 2013 They charge the actual time it takes. They threw the book away. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazeum Posted May 26, 2013 Share Posted May 26, 2013 (edited) I've been one of the "smart" engineers defining how much time it could take to perform some operations on cars. It is a task that OEM & system suppliers (me) have got huge debate (and tons of useless meetings). Me, as a supplier, had no gain or what so ever to change operation time but I was responsible for proper procedure (there're always many), proper tools & timing. I have found that final outcome is not always the smartest & most of the time, new tools have to be created (whereas job could be done with regular tools - but would require 5 extra minutes). New tools? to define if it is useful, OEM estimate how many cars official dealer would have to work on, take the cost of tools & divide the cost of tools per numbers of cars to fix. You get the answer if it is relevant to purchase new tools (at dealer expense of course - tool is having a license for one tool maker to produce at its given price ). With such process, you can start to understand why flat-rate are not always relevant. Of course time is defined with a skilled mechanic that can do the work blind which does not help either. A fair way of doing business would be to charge actual time and parts but with the mass of dealers, shops, mechanics where you cannot assume skills & problem solving accuracy, you have to find a way of being fair for customers. It is ruled out by OEM, at the end, it is not fair either... Imagine you go to a shop, they charge you $500 for exhaust replacement: parts & time. A friend of you with same car goes to another dealer & got charged $400 for the same exact work because shop #2 works faster. You would change immediately your shop. If those shops are auto dealer, OEM management would put tons of pressure on first shop to get better until they become faster than dealer #2. Then, dealer #2 would have to improve also their efficiency since shop #1 is now better, and so on.... It will not work on a large scale picture, especially when money & OEM are involved. Edited May 26, 2013 by Lazeum Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heroez Posted June 13, 2013 Share Posted June 13, 2013 Thanks for sharing that. It covers things I have to deal with as a bodyman. Its nice to know that others see it too. I could add a little to the list. Like the actual repair order time being shaved down and the tech gets this shaved copy while the boss stuffs his pockets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony D Posted June 16, 2013 Share Posted June 16, 2013 (edited) It's warranty time, gents. As a distributor, you are supposed to invest in the tooling to do the job faster. While five minutes seems like nothing, doing 12 operations is an hour... And on millions of vehicles that can mean millions of dollars saved/avoided in warranty costs. I do this for a compressor company. Use our $10,000 tool set on an HP Element replacement, you finish in 2~4 hours. That is what we will pay you in warranty time, plus travel. So that means a day... Don't use it, and it's not unrealistic that it can take 40 hours. Now, you COULD just do paid work and bill like that, or flat-rate bid the jobs using our special tooling have it done in two hours and bill for 40... But hey, it costs $10,000 for those tools... That's a new paint job on the boat, they do FINE billing hours... We won't reimburse that... As a distributor, sales profit funds the support activities for a short period. If the store is PROPERLY MANAGED (long term vision, and not just a conduit to siphon money for the principal's personal Yachting Fantasies...) you quickly have a fully equipped service department with the time saving gadgets and instrumentation to be VERY efficient in the mechanical end of the business. Do they do it? No. But I always see plenty of boats and fast cars in the bays... I took over a shop in the UK and within 3 months has the guys 125 to 150% productive on paid work and warranty with almost everybody going home at 17:00. I just started paying the guys by the flat-rate quotes they gave to the customer, and once they had billed 8 hours daily if they booked more work they were billed out at overtime rate for actual hours worked, four hours minimum. Key here is they were given ownership of the project--they knew what their customer would pay, what delays at the site would entail... and quoted accordingly. not some service manager (me) who was clueless of conditions in the field! "Sometimes the bear eats you, guys try to feast on bear as much as possible and we will do fine!" was the speech I gave them. Technically our Labor profit margin stayed constant but the billable hours went through the roof and warranty time dropped to almost nothing. Plus we started billing OVERTIME during normal working hours. Sure, it added payroll expense, but the profit margin on THOSE hours was through the roof! the big thing was pushing more parts, which makes the labor profit and cost look laughably irrelevant. The MBA's and Chartered Accountants were mystified how we could do that...the former service manager railed there was NO WAY I should be paying the guys like that as "they owe us 8 hours work"... My philosophical difference was I said they owed us 6.4 hours of billable time per day (80% productive)... If they gave us that...either through billed work or flat-rate quoted work they finished early... Then they should be rewarded for excellence. Same as any other professional. Before I took over, guys were literally hiding from the boss until they knew the flat-rate quoted time was up, before going to another job. I couldn't blame them. Three were ready to jump ship. All three remained after my changes... And as far as I know that is STILL how they work to this day! It's common in the compressor industry to have service managers upset that guys will finish a job in two hours, then "sit there polishing the machine until all the time on the quote is used up"--- the labor profit margin can't be fattened by screwing a guy because he works fast and efficient...yet they do it all the time. And resent the guys for "milking jobs"! Well, give then a squirt fresh from the udder and you will be shocked how fast they start working and what kind of profit you can REALLY make! As an "independent" competing for lucrative aftermarket service directly competing against the OEM (my former employer, incidentally...) we killed. And that shop continues to kill. It's not uncommon that the apprentices going into full service engineer status at age 20-21 make over £100K on this scheme, and only slightly less while apprenticing since if they were BILLING ENGINEER RATE, I PAID them Engineer Rate--another big departure from how things were run before... No running the apprentices to death to squeeze every bit out of their "cheap labor"---yes from a Smith-Style Management perspective I was grossly inefficient with my pay policies because I "paid them too much"... But funny... We stopped turnover, and nobody poached our third-year apprentices any longer (the point where they start doing REAL work and not just oil changes.) In reality, I truly don't believe it was so much the increase in PAY that kept the people around... It was the RESPECT I showed for their skills with their tools, in their craft, and with their customers. I did not view them as "grease monkeys" nor did I treat them like they were my slaves 8 hours daily to do my bidding. They were my partners in business, who when we profited, we ALL saw a return. No more telling guys to clean the shop. No more rousting after Tea... And if nobody showed on Friday because everybody had already billed 65-80 hours that week and didn't schedule any work...well, I just used the apprentices as the field staff then, or the on-call engineer. What did it really matter, any calls were billed as Overtime anyway! One engineer would bill 60 hours by Wednesday regularly, and just take off with his family for long weekends all summer long. During winter months I was told he regularly billed 80-100 hours working six days a week!!! Except the last two weeks around Christmas. As ANYBODY in the compressor business in the USA if they can get THAT kind of productivity out of their technicians! Chances are good they will have a problem with a guy "earning a salary" who doesn't show up on Friday, or takes Thursday and Friday off every week during the summer. THAT, my friends, the disregard for what the guy HAS DONE, is the root of the problem! Edited June 16, 2013 by Tony D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aarang Posted June 18, 2013 Share Posted June 18, 2013 I don't post much or voice an opinion, but this whole system just pisses me off. I can routinely bill 8 - 10 hrs or more of work in 5-6 hrs. If I go home early I'm 'stealing from the company.' Tony, you want to be my boss? lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xnke Posted June 19, 2013 Share Posted June 19, 2013 I wish I could find a job like that. There is a company that does alarm work in Kentucky, Tony...It could be profitable if the owner ran it like the shop you took over. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heroez Posted June 23, 2013 Share Posted June 23, 2013 Cripes, I have to face this again on monday. The brilliant mind that wrote the repair order missed the mark by 30 hrs. Lets see, the last one we did was 80 hrs and we made a profit... This job is the same but has 3 more panels... twice the work, so we add 5 hours? WTF? Idiots! Im flat rate, what do I do when Im handed a job I KNOW Im going to lose on? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lazeum Posted June 23, 2013 Share Posted June 23, 2013 you say NO and you should correct the mistake in perfect world Frustration, frustration.... To stop this mess on my side, I quit my job and I'm starting my own. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony D Posted June 25, 2013 Share Posted June 25, 2013 Seriously, I've been told I'm a a$$hole to work WITH, but great to work FOR! It never seemed right when I was at the bottom the way things were run. Never any carrot, only the stick. And the inherent "Smith Style" assumption that the worker will do as little as possible to get by. I have seen that, true enough. But I also watched a scheme where once technicians billed 32 hours, their pay adjusted UPWARDS. In a shop of 8 guys, three consistently billed 60+ hours a week. Five guys were in the shop playing cards and complaining how they should get paid more... I mean, this wasn't chump change either, we're talking oil changing monkeys that make $12 an hour getting bumped up to $19 an hour if they just kept themselves productive! Those guys would rather just get their 32 hours in, then sit in the shop all Friday, or go home RIGHT at 5PM every night than just work the full week. The three guys I saw working, THEY were the ones that got the new trucks, the FACTORY TRAINING, the BIG Christmas bonus. Of course, the other guys were upset at the "Golden Boys" who 'sucked up to management' but what they didn't realize was it was those THREE keeping THEM in a job. If it wasn't for the hours the three of them made on OT during the week (even at elevated rates, which carried over to overtime) I would have had to cut pay to around $8-10 hourly. The 32 hours was EXACTLY what we needed to bill in that shop to pay for a man. I was my full time job to keep those guys busy. Some of them said I was a "slave driver" for working them 32 hours a week. Fact of the matter was, if I DIDN'T DO IT, come the fall, they would have had PLENTY of time to go hunting! Had one exception to that rule. Guy worked 8 hours religiously, never worked overtime, never worked really more than 32 hours. And he took days off regularly without pay. As long as I wasn't paying him, hell, he could take all the time he wanted off! Everybody else wanted time off WITH pay. This guy showed up, did a really good job when he was there, and when he wasn't, we didn't pay him. He was cool with it, and on average he came in around 32 hours for about 40 weeks a year. He always let us know when he was taking time off, and if we NEEDED him to work he would. We actually kept him on over the winter because of it. He was a really valuable asset to the place because of his flexibility, and it was weird to see how his numbers as a "flake" actually stacked up to guys that were there five days a week who rarely worked overtime, weekends, and spend Fridays in the shop playing cards. I actually called him and let him know the OEM was going to shut down their shop. He got the opportunity to make exit plans, and the three top guys had no problems whatsoever getting picked up by the new overlords.... but those slackers with no commitment.... in Michigan? HAH! Good Luck and good riddance! The owners were shocked when they got cancelled. Their gravy train ended. No more boat every three years... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
260DET Posted June 28, 2013 Share Posted June 28, 2013 You are not alone with this problem America. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony D Posted June 29, 2013 Share Posted June 29, 2013 The cheapening of apprenticeship under the fallacy of "education substitution for experience" is lamented universally by craftsmen. But praised by educators and youth who see it as easier and quicker to 'get respect' than actually experiencing life. Just CLEP out of it and start as a boss instead... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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