By Pierre Desmarchais
Recently, in two different shops, I was faced with a “good” problem—one that can slowly but surely turn into a source of irritation and stress.
• “This makes no sense, Pierre, I don’t even know where to put them anymore…”
• “That pickup has been sitting here for two weeks and we still haven’t had time to touch it.”
• “My team needs to be more aware and stop dragging their feet. I’m the one who ends up staying until 10 p.m. to finish the day.”
• “Leave it with us, we’ll find some downtime during the day to bring it in…”
Does any of this sound familiar?
I could probably end the article with just comments like these.
What I’ve noticed in the places where this situation occurs is a fear of running out of work and a reluctance to admit it—combined with a feeling of responsibility for clients’ problems, especially those labeled as “good clients.”
Let me come back with my tough questions:
• Are you really short on work?
• Are you really short on customers?
• Or are you short on structure and organization?
Managing the Workflow
The challenge lies in saying yes without knowing the shop’s production capacity and how many labour hours need to be delivered today, over the next two days, or in the coming week.
You need to recognize when the shop is at full production capacity—without overloading it—because too much is just as bad as not enough.
You need to be able to say no in your head and translate that into:
“We could take care of that next Thursday,”
or
“Can you leave it with us for the day? That would work better for us.”
You’ll no doubt appreciate that this requires the right person at the service counter—someone with the necessary qualities to implement, and above all maintain, this organizational discipline.
If, at this point, you’re thinking:
• “No way, I’m not doing that!”
• “We’re just a small shop, we don’t need that!”
Then you’ve just identified where the real issue lies.
You probably already have what it takes to put this in place—but more important than implementing it is having the discipline to maintain it.
Food for thought. I’ll write again soon.
Pierre Desmarchais
Picture and text credit : Pierre Desmarchais
