By: Blake Levesque, Client Solutions Advisor
In today's fast-paced, ever-changing collision repair industry, keeping employees on the same page when it comes to production management is more challenging than ever – and a one size fits all approach just won't cut it.
In my role as a Client Solutions Advisor at CCC, I spend my days in shops across my home state of Wisconsin. I have shops that service major cities and small towns, but no two shops are alike.
One of my favorite ways to help a shop optimize their CCC tools is by introducing them to the Digital Production Board, a powerful new feature within cccone.com designed specifically for our shop management customers.
With everything in one place, every area of the shop – from customer service representatives to estimators and technicians – can stay perfectly aligned. Each team member can access the specific information they need to excel in their role, without having to search far.
Still not sure if this new tool is right for you? Here’s what I’ve found from working in shops like yours:
Every shop has their own flavor of how they track production. Maybe you print out a production schedule and talk through it each morning, or you have a faded whiteboard that may or may not have this week’s vehicles. But what if, instead, you could manage your production schedule all in one place online…
That’s the beauty of the digital production board. From one place online, you can customize boards to fit your needs – both for the shop as a whole and individually. A painter may only be concerned with the paint hours on a job, while a production manager is concerned with not assigning labor until all the parts are in. Your production manager can have a 10,000 ft view of the shop, while each technician can have their own board to track just their jobs.
The flexibility allows the boards to scale with the repair facility’s growth or adapt on the fly to changing business needs.
When I first started spending time in shops, one of the first things I noticed was the noise – and not just how loud a shop can be, but the mental load each person has trying to keep all their tasks straight. The activity "noise" alone can be overwhelming: a tow truck dropping off a car, a customer dropping in for an estimate, a parts delivery, and a sublet vendor can all be buzzing around at the same time.
You need something that can cut through the noise and help your team focus on their specific tasks at hand. This is the power of the production board. One place that visually represents the production schedule of your shop that updates easily and helps your team visualize the flow of vehicles.
The beauty of this visual board is that it also can be used in lots of places. A technician may have it on their workstation to see what to work on next, the production manager may have it on a recently-dusted-off tablet to update production phases in real-time, and the whole shop can see what’s going on from a board on a shared big screen.
One source of truth that’s easy for anyone to understand can help your shop work smoothly as a team.
The benefit of working with someone like CCC is that all the tools work together in harmony. The same can be said for production boards. When you make an update to a vehicle by dragging and dropping into a new phase, your production schedule will also update.
That connected, harmonious flow extends into all your shop, too. For example, consider your customer service representatives. If a customer calls and asks about vehicle status, a well-orchestrated telephone game usually occurs: the rep asks the estimator, who then asks technician, who then lets you know the detailer is getting the car ready for pickup.
Rather than this complicated update process, a well-connected team could have cut out multiple middlemen to find the answer to "is my car ready?" A customer service team member could look at the board and see where a car is on their own and update the customer while they were still on the phone. No putting them on hold, no chasing down information.
As I said before, taking advantage of this free tool is simple if you already have our Repair Workflow shop management tools – just log in to cccone.com, click the left-hand navigation to open "Production Board," and follow the prompts.
That's it. Simple steps to take advantage of a tool that can transform your production meetings, reducing guesswork and outdated information. From one place, show how the pieces of your shop’s production puzzle fit together effectively to drive performance.
