By Sheila Loftus
April 2007

Imagine you are a pasta chef and you spend 90 percent of your time hovering over pots of water, waiting for them to boil.

Now imagine you are a collision repair shop owner and you spend 90 percent of your time worrying about the 90 percent of a vehicle’s cycle time that it spends in the paint department.

In both situations, it’s time for lean manufacturing. Or whatever phrase you want to assign to the notion of keeping the work—whether it’s making pasta or repairing vehicles—moving.

The solution to the pasta chef’s situation is simple: Start the water boiling as soon as you step into the kitchen. And don’t watch over the pots. Start chopping up the garlic or dicing the tomatoes or whatever else you need to do.

The solution to the collision repair shop owner’s situation isn’t as simple, although it isn’t perilously problematic either. It simply means finding a way to keep cars moving through the paint department. Maybe it means investing in better paint products. Maybe it means buying an extra downdraft booth. Maybe it means motivating the painters to improve their efficiency.

A business with a bottleneck can’t be practicing lean manufacturing. It can only be practicing rush-hour manufacturing, with all its attendant congestion and frustration.

Here’s another metaphor to describe the problem, courtesy of Paul Krauss of Craftsman Auto Body in Northern Virginia. Imagine your collision repair shop is a snake. Imagine it feeding off mice all week, all month, all year. The mice go in, the mice get digested, the mice disappear. Efficiency in motion.

It all looks smooth.

Now imagine that instead of mice, your snake—your business—occasionally swallows a rat. No, let’s be more dramatic—a pig. Suddenly, the snake’s digestive system slows to the efficiency of a three-legged turtle on Valium.

It all looks…grotesque.

Collision repair shops are too often allowing themselves to feast on swine. It may not be the paint department that causes the slowdown. It may be a collision repairer who has his tools spread all over the building as opposed to in a neat alignment within reach. It might be the front office employee who schedules a car to be repaired two days before any parts for it will be ready. Or maybe some of your technicians are mimicking independent contractors, working to suit their schedule and not yours.

Lean manufacturing means no pigs! Or pig-headed thinking!

Lean manufacturing means that when a car comes into a shop, it should move through that shop like it was in a car wash. It should never go back to the soap cycle when it’s already been through rinse.

One of the early masters of lean manufacturing was a collision repair shop owner named Eddie Garneau. Garneau’s nickname was Fast Eddie—with reason. He prided himself on getting cars in and out of his facility at top speed. At the same time, he didn’t sacrifice quality. He simply devised a system that excluded bottlenecks.

Heck, Fast Eddie wouldn’t even bring a car into his shop until all the parts were on deck. (He had a lot across the street for the waiting vehicles.) If he needed a part fast, he didn’t hesitate to spend a couple of bucks and have the part FedExed.

And his paint department? Garneau had the paint codes marked on the parts before the parts were even delivered to the paint shop.

Garneau eliminated wasted time—any wasted time.

And he was so lean that he retired—by choice and contentedly—well before his prime.

Garneau wasn’t familiar with the term “lean manufacturing” because it didn’t exist when he was perfecting its techniques. He operated on instinct and innate smarts. He was a pioneer without intending to be anything more than a successful businessman.

But Garneau has counterparts in today’s collision repair business. Paul Krauss is one of them. So is Michael Giarrizzo Jr., formerly of the collision repair industry consolidator Sterling and now the president and CEO of his own business, DCR Systems in Mentor, Ohio, in the U.S.

Krauss says latching onto lean manufacturing techniques doesn’t necessarily come easy—and it certainly doesn’t come overnight. You have to keep studying lean manufacturing—day after day, month after month. And then one day, all of the sudden, it will sink in and make magnificent sense.

You’ll see the pig.

You’ll know what to do so you’ll have no more pigs in the future.

Yes, there are huge obstacles collision repair shop owners face in turning their businesses into lean machines. The insurance industry, for example. And I could write three columns in my sleep on that subject.

But the fact that Fast Eddie Garneau succeeded in the past—and the fact that Krauss, Giarrizzo, and others are succeeding now—proves that the obstacles aren’t in themselves the pigs.

Isn’t it time you took a good, hard look at your business and asked, “Where’s the pig?”

© 2007 Sheila’s Information Network Inc.

Sheila Loftus (sheilaloftus@yahoo.com), past publisher of the CRASH Network, has written about the auto collision repair industry for 32 years. She lives in Washington, D.C.