Technician efficiency

Technician efficiency is the flat-rate hours a tech produced divided by the hours they were clocked on those jobs. It is the shop's measure of speed against published time, and it runs over 100 percent on any technician who knows the work.

How is technician efficiency measured?

Billed hours over clocked hours, on the jobs only. A tech clocked onto tickets for 8 hours who bills 9 flat-rate hours is at 112 percent. The arithmetic is easy and the data collection is where shops go wrong, because it depends on technicians clocking on and off jobs honestly, every time, including the ten minutes spent helping somebody else.

Shops that let the clock run all day get a number that mixes speed with idle time. That figure has a different name, and reading one as the other is the most common mistake made with either.

What is efficiency not measuring?

Whether the technician had anything to work on. Efficiency divides billed hours by the hours spent on jobs, so an empty bay never enters the arithmetic at all. Technician productivity is the number that catches it, because its denominator is every hour the technician was available to work.

The split matters because the two halves have different owners. A tech controls speed. The shop controls whether there is a car in the bay with parts on the shelf and an approval on the ticket, and blaming a technician for the second one is how good people leave.

What does payroll count instead?

Every hour worked. Efficiency divides by the hours a technician sat on jobs, and the payroll register divides by the whole week. Federal wage rules compute a pieceworker's regular rate by adding up the week's earnings and dividing that sum "by the number of hours worked in the week for which such compensation was paid".

Those two denominators are the shop's exposure in one line. Federal rule counts the waiting as work: a "factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired" is working through that inactivity, because "waiting is an integral part of the job. The employee is engaged to wait." An hour a technician spends standing at the parts counter flags nothing and still lands in the payroll divisor. Efficiency reports how fast the work moved, and the distance between that figure and what the week cost is where a pay plan quietly stops working.

What drags efficiency down that is not the technician?

The counter, mostly. Hours clocked on a job that is waiting for a customer to call back, or spent chasing a part that came in wrong, or burned on a comeback that bills nothing at all. A tech can be moving all day and produce nothing the number will credit them for.

Diagnostic work does the same thing in a different way. An hour of testing that ends in no fault found is an hour worked, and if the shop does not bill for diagnosis it lands on the technician's efficiency as dead time. Charging for that hour is ordinary enough that the Federal Trade Commission tells consumers to expect it: "many repair shops charge for diagnostic time". Shops with a real diagnostic policy see steadier numbers, because the hours have somewhere to go.

Where does efficiency mislead a diesel shop?

Job mix. Long jobs with published times and few interruptions favor the number, so a tech doing driveline and heavy-line work looks fast. Driveability diagnosis on a truck with an intermittent code does not, and it is often the shop's best technician on the hardest ticket.

Read the two kinds of work separately or the report will tell you to move your strongest diagnostician onto brake jobs. The number that keeps that honest is hours sold per ticket next to book time, which shows what the work was worth rather than how quickly somebody cleared it.

What does a shop do with the number?

Use it to find the constraint, then fix the constraint. A shop-wide efficiency figure that sags in the same week every month usually points at scheduling. One technician sitting low while everybody else holds steady points at training or at a dispatcher sending them work they have never done.

Ask the technician before you ask the report. They can name the week the number moved and usually what moved with it.

The number is also the honest input to a labor rate conversation. Hours produced are what the shop has to sell, and if those hours are leaking into unbilled time, no price increase fixes it. Pair the reading with hours per repair order and the picture stops being about how fast anybody works.

Back to the glossary, or read about flat rate pay.