- Tie up your loose ends and evaluate all of your policies and procedures. You can’t fix these problems when your shop is in crisis and you have no techs, adverse weather, no parts, etc. Make your improvements and become as efficient and lean as you can. This will serve you better than you could hope for in a time of extreme challenge.
- Being proactive is the key to a calm, understanding customer. Make that preemptive call or text, advising them of winter-related delays/challenges.
- Schedule, schedule, schedule! Live and die by the schedule. You want to help a customer in need but you only have so much production capacity. The road to hell is paved with good intentions…and how true that is. In our opinion, customers give you only about a 24- to 48-hour grace period regarding weather-related delays. A big component of this is parts. Our CEO, Val Fichera, is known for saying, “You can’t make the dinner without the groceries!” If we could do it all over again, we would have turned off some accounts in the few locations that suffered power outages. Even when customers come in and see we’re without power, as they probably are too, they sometimes still expect that we’re going to repair their vehicles in record time. They just don’t understand the dynamic of production and orchestrating collision repair and all of the components that need to be in sync to make the miracle of what we do happen on a consistent and timely basis…and please both the vehicle owner and insurance company.
- Warn employees as much as possible about the dangers of the weather. Snow shoveling and even walking can be hazardous. While we all want to step up to the plate and hit a home run, we need to be mindful of our employees first, keeping them healthy and able to produce effectively. Collision Care is a company that has always relied on and valued our employees. We’re proud that we have one of the best employee retention rates in our region. This storm reminded us that the engine that drives this company is not our process or procedures or Six Sigma but our people. We couldn’t have been prouder of our employees for stepping up when the systems failed, computers went down and the power disappeared. This company still ran well!
- Be flexible. We certainly were not more efficient during this storm. We were so accustomed to the efficiency we developed through our Six Sigma training and implemented at all our stores that we had to revert back to the “old way” of doing things, like ordering parts from cell phones. We had to adjust on the fly and adopt the Marine-type mentality of “Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.” From that standpoint, our company got stronger because we had to operate without our big guns and no cover. At the same time, it was a measure of our company’s X factor of talent. Who can think on the fly, outside the box and outside the system? It was kind of like a flight simulator that’s doomed to fail. Nothing was working. Computers were down, parts were hard to come by, raw materials were at a standstill, etc. If you can produce in that kind of environment and still keep your vendors, it’s a testament to your company.