Are you Running Service or Is Service Running You? - Part IV The Value of Good Parts and Dispatch Managers I’ve been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with many outstanding office equipment dealers in my career. This is the fourth installment of the series of articles developed based upon many quality practices these dealers use. Most of what I discuss here is not necessarily new information, but I’ve seen the same common problems in varying degrees in almost every dealer. With this in mind I’d like to highlight these common areas of concern and offer suggestions on how to solve the often-complex nature of running service. I’m often amazed when visiting dealers at the apparent misunderstanding of how their parts manager and dispatchers affect the overall function and efficiency of their service departments. Both of these individuals are absolutely critical when it comes to the customer’s perception of their businesses and a significant share of their service department’s manpower requirements. Technology such as wireless dispatch has done a great deal to improve the overall accuracy and productivity of the technician’s interface with dispatch. But even with wireless dispatch you cannot overlook the value of the dispatchers and how they influence the customer’s perception of your business. Customer Care It goes without saying that the individuals that interface with your customers can make or break much of the relationship with your company. After the salesman is long gone, the primary contact with your business will be when the customer calls in for service or supplies. It is of the utmost importance that these individuals interfacing with these customers be trained in customer service skills and understand the significant role they play in your organization. Technicians know that much of the customer’s temperament when they arrive will have been already determined by how the dispatcher dealt with them at the time they placed their service call. Diffusing an angry customer can go a long way in assisting your technicians to put final closure on the problem the customer is having. Having all the information about the customer’s situation is also key to their ability to empathize with the customer’s situation. Each interaction should be carefully documented, not only for the benefit of the technician, but also for the benefit of all involved. Knowing why the customer called, their state of urgency, the current call load, and who can best solve their problem can all be information gathered and correlated by dispatch. It becomes obvious then that any time and training investments made in your dispatchers, making sure that they know how to handle your customers, how your automation software works, and if appropriate, how to effectively keep your technician’s priorities in line with the customers, is money well spent. A good dispatcher can take advantage of the fact that they know where the technicians are and where they are needed and use that to reduce wait time by your customers. GPS and proper territory assignments are additional tools to improve this effectiveness. They can also reduce the amount of wasted tech time by ensuring the technicians are where they are supposed to be. Depending on your basic territory structure, having them familiar with your geography can be helpful in their decisions about which tech can get there the quickest from their current location. I also believe it is to everyone’s advantage to rotate technicians into dispatch, so they can understand what goes on in dispatch and what dispatchers have to manage, as well as putting dispatchers in the field with technicians for the same reason. Both can learn a lot from each other and the experience will make them better at their jobs. Parts Logistics Good parts and inventory control managers are in my opinion far more valuable than most give them credit for. For the average dealer in our customer base this person can cost the dealers as much as 20+% of their total technician manpower requirements. Why? Because statistics show that more than 34% of the time the service call will require parts. Statistics also show the dealers will have an average of 20+% of the total calls generated by customer result in an additional call because the technician doesn’t have the necessary parts to fix the machine on the first visit. Think about this for a moment; your parts person has control of over 30% of your technical manpower if they completely miss the boat on restocking your technicians. Is it realistic to expect a 0% percent hold for part rate (HP%)? Impossible! But if you could lower your hold for part rate to 8% which is about as low as I’ve seen it realistically maintained, this represents a 12+% reduction in over all calls. So if your company does 1000 calls per month, 120 of those calls would simply go away, and either allow you to reduce your staff or provide the improved response time equal to one and a half additional techs. When your parts person does not properly equip your technicians for their jobs, you are literally throwing your most expensive resource (manpower) at a parts logistics problem, not to mention the thousands of dollars in overnight parts shipping costs normally associated poor parts management as well. Does this require higher inventories? I don’t believe so. My experience is that a good parts manager is constantly balancing the primary need of getting the technicians the right parts at the right time, with the need to constantly be adjusting the on hand inventory to its minimum. So not only can this individual cost you unnecessary manpower but they can also cost you huge dollars in obsolete and excess inventory if not properly managed. It seems almost illogical that dealers put someone in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory, as well making them responsible for almost one quarter of your required technical staff’s time, but yet more often than not, this person has no formal education in inventory control or distribution. In some cases the parts manager is a former warehouse employee or ex-field tech. Although some of the individuals may be quite good, simply look at the amount of inventory (or obsolete inventory) and the percentage of no parts calls and you can quickly determine if hiring a more qualified manager is justifiable. You can also address this issue with technology—BEI’s Effective Workload Distribution software can not only assign an appropriate workload for your technicians, but also generate an accurate required car stock, so the parts manager only has to make the appropriate adjustments to each technician’s car stock. This will free his time up to ensuring he’s managing your inbound shipping costs through better forecasting, and maximizing your warranty opportunities. I think most dealers wrestle with parts inventories and the effectiveness of the technicians in this regard, but you must look at the source. Proper selection of a good parts manager and the support personnel that help that person can be worth far more than you will likely have to pay to get a highly qualified service manager. Usually only a small percentage of your no parts calls will be caused by the vendor being out of parts. In my travels, I’ve been able to document that better than 80% of the average dealers’ no part calls are for parts that the technician normally had in his car inventory. What is happening is that they are not restocked often or fast enough, therefore they’ve used their on-hand stock and require additional items. The response to this is to increase the quantity of those items, or simply shortening your restock time will accomplish the same task and is generally much cheaper. There will always be unusual parts that rarely fail or that the vendor backorders on. But these are the exception, not the rule. A qualified parts manager will understand that better forecasting means lower shipping expenses, consistently lower inventory amounts, and fewer no part calls. If you currently have a parts manager who’s doing a good job and keeping your service organization running at optimum levels, commend them on a job well done. If your parts person is not achieving the inventory standards required, get them enrolled in courses designed around distribution and inventory control. This education will pay huge dividends to your organization, and can dramatically increase your customer’s satisfaction.u Mr. McArtor is the president of BEI Services, Inc. that now tracks every service call that occurs on over 3.5 million imaging devices, around the world. If you have any questions please contact BEI Services, (316)772-0234 or Wes@BEIServices.com.