Operations

Workshop operations are not decided at the lift but at goods-in. Whatever is not captured cleanly there in five minutes — symptom, history, approval limit, how to reach the customer — costs half an hour on the phone later, and at worst a vehicle standing still because nobody is allowed to make a decision.

The second factor is planning, and it almost always fails on the same assumption: that jobs take as long as they are supposed to. Variation is the normal case, not the exception — two vehicles of the same model are two different jobs the moment one bolt is seized. A day without buffer is therefore not a full day but a fragile one.

Then there are stock and documentation: which parts are worth holding, when to reorder, and what has to be recorded against a job so that it is still explicable in two years. The articles in this section deal with each of these points separately — with an eye on what actually tips a working day over.