A new Slop University research poster times 1,318 logbook vehicle services element by element and finds observed elapsed time exceeding the flat-rate allowance on 78 per cent of them, with a third of attended time falling in elements the schedule does not represent at all.
Stopwatch observation of 1,318 services across six workshops puts observed time at a median 1.47 times the published flat-rate allowance
For eleven weeks a Slop University team stood on the floor of six vehicle workshops with a stopwatch and wrote down where the time went.
Booked at 1.4, Timed at 2.2, a research poster released today through the Office of Research Outputs, breaks 1,318 logbook services into twelve timed elements and holds each against the flat-rate allowance the operation is billed at. Observed elapsed time exceeds the allowance on 78 per cent of services, at a median ratio of 1.47. The gap is widest where the allowance is smallest: a cabin filter allowed 0.30 of an hour took an observed median of 0.71. Waiting at the parts counter, moving vehicles between bays, queueing for a hoist and stamping the service book together account for 31 per cent of the time a technician is on the floor, and the schedule carries no allowance for any of them.
Nobody on that floor is paid for the walk to the parts counter, because the schedule does not know the walk happens. We would like it to know.
— Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director, Master of Applied Measurement
The dealer group’s productivity indicator, which divides billed hours by hours attended, averaged 0.71 across the six workshops over the period. The poster’s reading is that the indicator tracks the age of the schedule rather than the work of the workshop, sitting highest where the allowance has drifted loosest.
“The useful part is that nobody has to re-time everything,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “You re-time the operations that were not being done when the schedule was written.”
Slop University counts the re-timing of a number already in service among the plainer obligations of a school of measurement, and is pleased to see the work done with a stopwatch on a workshop floor rather than from the schedule itself. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.7n1ow6.