One of the greatest challenges in the snow and ice management industry is navigating staffing and labor shortages. With the chaos surrounding the topic, it can be difficult to find the time to truly dive into your needs and figure out how many employees you need in order to be effective. Many times, we’re thinking about wage increases, benefits, or how we can attract employees by highlighting the organization’s culture or opportunity.

It is no different when considering your shop operations. Many times, organizations face budget or financial constraints that make hiring and retaining good mechanics challenging. This article will give you some tools to dive into your shop needs and figure out how lean and mean you can run your shop while performing an exceptional level of service internally and utilizing your outsourced facilities wisely.

Fleet and shop best practices

The most important step in this entire process is to examine your fleet and understand what it takes to maintain the vehicles and equipment annually and to prepare for unplanned repairs. Two fleet and shop management best practices to strive for:

1. Try to maintain 90% direct labor and 10% indirect labor for shop personnel.

Direct labor – Billable time to vehicle and equipment repairs or custom billable projects to departments and clients.

Indirect labor – Time spent cleaning the shop, organizing the parts room, or traveling to pick up parts, etc.

2.  Try to hit the goal of 50% of shop personnel time spent on preventive or planned maintenance, and 50% for unplanned diagnostics and repairs.

Preventive or Predictive Maintenance – Items like oil changes, brake repairs, tire R&R, fluid services, etc., that can be identified through maintenance schedules and proper periodic safety inspections.

Unplanned Diagnostics and Repairs – This time is reserved for addressing component failures. For example, a check engine light comes on because an engine sensor failed or a hydraulic cylinder fails because the seals leaked oil.

Know your fleet stats

The next key task is to gather your fleet information and understand the data behind it. While this may be a hefty task for some given the size and geographical distribution of their fleets, it is a must to understand what it takes to effectively staff your shop. Here is information you should gather:

• Total count of vehicles and equipment by make and model.
• Service intervals and schedules for each equipment make and model from the manufacturer or owner’s manual.
• A custom schedule for preventive and predictive maintenance (an estimate of how often you perform this on each asset is fine).
• Hours or miles each vehicle and equipment is used per year (it is OK to average numbers based on make and model).

The best way to do this is to build a spreadsheet to gather and track the information; then you can begin to analyze the data. The charts below offer an example of the information you want to gather, and how it can help you draw your conclusions.

This list doesn’t need to be extremely detailed, and you can customize your spreadsheet to fit your company’s needs. Fleet and shop management software can also provide this data. As long as you’re capturing the important data, you can make this work.

 
Outsourcing and other support

With the labor challenges and shortages everyone is facing, there are other options to help bridge the gaps. You might identify repairs that may be better suited for dealers or independent shops that have specific diagnostic and repair tools, certified mechanics, or a better staffing situation that allows them to focus on manufacturer-specific equipment. You can then keep your shop team focused on maintaining a healthy and manageable workload.

Planning is key

As you work through this evaluation process, you’ll have additional information and insights that will help you determine your shop’s needs. You may have multiple shop facilities, different levels of experience within your mechanics, or the opportunity to provide additional training for them. Every organization’s situation is different, and you have to make adjustments; but having this as a foundation will be helpful in your shop management processes.

Calculating mechanic team needs
Gather your fleet composition, total number of assets, labor hours per asset each year, and the total labor hours per make and model per year. Add the hours per year your fleet requires for planned and unplanned labor hours you can expect to cover. Considering the direct labor to indirect labor goals you’ve set, use the total to estimate the available hours for your mechanics. Divide the total direct and indirect labor hours needed for your fleet by the available hours to generate the number of mechanics you need. In the example below, I came up with 4.3. Since you’re a little higher than four mechanics, you can make adjustments to accommodate for the gap or additional needs.

Michael Wagner, CSP, ASM is Director of Operations at Designscapes Colorado Inc. Contact him at 303-328-5554 or mwagner@designscapes.org.