Dealerships expand service hours to meet growing workload without adding bays

When Joe Miller became service manager of Webster Groves Subaru in suburban St. Louis in October 2018, he found his shop didn't have enough time or space to do its work.

While the service department typically filled 40 to 50 repair orders a day, it carried over another eight to 10 tickets to the next day.

"We couldn't get all the work done that people were coming in for," Miller told Fixed Ops Journal. "We were having a tremendous amount of carryovers and frustrated customers."

Almost immediately, Miller extended the store's Saturday service hours to 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; the shop previously had closed at 1 p.m. Last December, he also extended the dealership's weekday service hours — previously 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. — to 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. He overhauled his technicians' work shifts to accommodate the longer hours, and he hired two more techs to fill out his team of 10 line techs in the eight-bay shop.

The changes contributed to increased sales, Miller says, because service customers appreciated the shorter waits and greater convenience. The techs were happier too, he adds, because their schedules were more flexible and created more consecutive days off.

As demands for service increase, limited shop capacity is a growing problem for many new-vehicle dealerships. Cox Automotive reported in its most recent Service Industry Study that customer wait times are getting longer as use of service bays grows. As 86 percent of dealership service bays are in use on a typical day, the study notes, 30 percent of consumers reported their biggest complaint with dealership service was that it took longer than they expected.

To address these issues, "more and more dealerships [are] offering service hours in the evenings and on weekends, even on Sundays," says Darrel Ferguson, director of performance management at Cox Automotive's Xtime subsidiary. The Cox study suggests that about half of dealerships are handling higher demand by scheduling more service on weekends. Extended hours also enable a dealership to bring in more techs and keep them busy without adding service bays, analysts say.

Terry Weszner, fixed operations manager at Kupper Subaru in Mandan, N.D., says his shop was scheduling appointments as much as two weeks in advance because his techs couldn't keep up with demand, even when they doubled up on using service bays. Weszner couldn't add a bay, so he extended his shop hours to 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week. The shop previously was open weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The expanded schedule allowed him to hire four techs.

"It's definitely reduced our wait time," Weszner says. "We went down to a couple days as far as booking out, and sometimes customers can even get in the next day."

Lee Harkins, CEO of the fixed ops consulting group M5 Management Services Inc. in Pelham, Ala., notes that many automakers are pressing their dealers to boost service capacity to help meet increased customer demand. But adding bays is expensive, and many dealerships lack the space to do so, he says.

Ideally, Harkins says, a dealership's service hours would match its sales hours. Still, any service extension provides more convenience to time-pressed customers, who often must schedule service visits around their own work hours, he says.

Harkins says that when a dealership client he declined to identify added Sunday service hours several years ago, it discovered that 40 percent of its Sunday customers had not previously brought their vehicle to the store for maintenance or repairs. A 2017 study by the National Automobile Dealers Association estimated that 7 percent of franchised dealerships offer Sunday service hours.

Matt Hutson, service director at Coggin Honda in Jacksonville, Fla., says the dealership added two hours to its weekday service schedule in 2014 to attract more customers. The shop now is open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. weekdays and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays. The store has 30 service bays, Hutson says, so the expanded schedule created 300 more potential labor hours each week.

Hutson says the shop is getting more work done, although he did not cite specific figures. The extended hours also appeal to customers, he says.

"The less work the customer has to do to do business with us, the more likely we're going to get their business," Hutson says. "We wanted to make sure we were minimizing the amount of work for them with an increase in our availability."

The biggest advantage of expanded service hours and revised work schedules, Harkins says, is dealerships' enhanced ability to hire and retain techs. Many techs prefer a workweek that consists of longer but fewer days than the traditional five eight-hour days, he says.

"If you can run an ad where a tech works three days a week, versus the five they're working now, they're all over it," Harkins says. "They're very interested."

Since Miller switched his shop to a 10-hour, four-day workweek, he says more tech candidates have approached him. Weszner went even further, placing his techs on a workweek of three 13-hour days when his dealership extended service hours in September 2017.

Weszner concedes that productivity initially slipped slightly as the techs got used to the new schedule, but says they now are working more efficiently than before the switch. Repair order counts were 40 percent higher last month than during the first month of the change, and labor hours increased 45 percent. He declined to provide exact numbers. The service department's labor sales nearly doubled, he adds, although he acknowledges that part of that growth resulted from price increases.

Kupper Subaru's 10 line technicians work in two teams of five techs in five bays. The first team works Thursday, Friday and Saturday one week, and Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday the following week. When tech shifts change on Thursday, the first team gets seven straight days off.

The 38 techs at Coggin Honda work in three weekday shifts: 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and noon to 8 p.m. But Hutson says he would like to switch to a four-day workweek and add Sunday service hours if the dealership authorizes him to hire techs.

The line techs at Webster Groves Subaru work in two teams of three techs and one team of four techs on a rotating three-week schedule. An express lube team of two techs works each weekday. Two "floater" techs handle recall work and fill holes in the shop schedule.

Since the dealership expanded its service hours, Miller says, the number of carryover repair orders has dwindled and the volume of completed repair orders has increased, to about 45 to 60 a day. In the first month of longer hours, he adds, labor sales jumped 70 percent and gross profit from service sales more than doubled from the previous month. He would not provide sales numbers.

Miller says the service department has sustained those gains. In 2019, its monthly average gross profit is at least 30 percent higher than in the year-earlier period, he says.

At the same time, Miller adds, techs feel empowered by the new work shifts.

"It's pretty efficient and it keeps morale up," Miller says. "It freed me up to do more important things. It takes a load off of management" because the techs' work schedule remains consistent, he notes.

"I'm a firm believer in giving the technicians some control over their environment," he says. "This is one way to do that."