Not to be overlooked when seeking ways to improve technician and shop efficiency and productivity is to incorporate what others have done.
Lessons can be learned from how Toyota Motor Sales USA (www.toyota.com/usa) developed a more efficient and securable system for storing and retrieving Special Service Tools (SST), recommended for a specific repair of a specific car manufacturer. The company requires all of its 1,400 Toyota and Lexus dealerships to own SST.
Dealers are supposed to store these tools in a central location so that service technicians can quickly find them when needed, say Toyota officials. The reality was, in many dealerships, “technicians spent way too much time hunting for SST.”
The average technician spent a minimum of six minutes per day on the hunt, and it wasn’t unheard of to squander an hour searching for a particular item. With the average dealership employing 14 technicians, costs added up over the course of the year.
To make matters worse, the average dealer was spending $1,500 per year replacing tools that had been lost or stolen.
The cause of the problem was that the old tool board and racking system held only 40 percent of a dealership’s total SST, Toyota officials discovered. Some dealerships kept the additional tools in boxes, others on open shelving. Most didn’t lock the tools when not in use, and most had no effective way to keep track of which technician had what tool at any moment.
PILOT SURVEY
When Toyota decided to tackle the problem, the company performed a pilot survey study and identified SST as “a redundant dealership cost, a hindrance to maximum shop productivity and a potential customer satisfaction issue,” according to Jim Sapunarich, Toyota’s advanced vehicles and equipment manager. It became clear that there was “a need for a central, securable storage system that all dealers would benefit from utilizing.”
Toyota worked with Vidmar (stanleyvidmar.com), a manufacturer of custom-configured storage solutions for heavy duty applications, to design a system appropriate for all dealerships.
“We asked them to give us a complete set of tools,” says Joe Micek, a storage sales engineer with Vidmar. “We then designed a storage system based on those tools that would also have room for 25-percent growth.”
The three-cabinet system organizes tools by category: powertrain, diagnostic, chassis, fuel and emissions, and so on. Each category includes large and small drawers to accommodate different-sized tools.
Labels on the drawer pulls identify the category of tools stored within, and partitions inside the drawers create compartments sized for particular tools. Line art and photos in each compartment make it easy to put tools back in the right place, while an index on the outside of the cabinet makes quick work of finding tools when needed.
The service or parts manager controls access to the system and keeps track of who is using what.
“The Vidmar system has made our technicians more productive,” says Toyota’s Sapunarich. “They’re working on cars rather than searching for tools.
“Our service managers tell us it’s one of the most helpful things we have ever done in tools and equipment.”
