Technician productivity

Technician productivity is billed hours divided by the hours the technician was available to work, written as a percentage. A technician clocked in for 40 hours who billed 32 is running 80 percent. The number answers one question for an owner: how much of the payroll I paid for turned into labor a customer was charged for.

How is it calculated?

Take the labor hours billed out on closed repair orders for the period. Divide by the hours the technician was on the clock and available. Multiply by a hundred.

The definition of available is where shops differ, and it is worth settling in writing. Most count paid attendance and exclude vacation, holidays and unpaid time off. What stays in, deliberately, is every hour the technician was standing in the building with nothing to turn a wrench on. Excluding those hours makes the number look better and destroys the reason to measure it.

Federal wage rules give that hour a name. The Labor Department's regulation on waiting time says an employee who is "engaged to wait" is working, and its examples include "a factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired." A technician standing at the parts counter is in that position. Whatever the pay plan does with the hour, a productivity number that drops it is measuring the wrong denominator.

The next section of the same rule draws the other edge. Time when the employee is "completely relieved from duty" and free to use it for their own purposes is not hours worked, which is what a lunch break and a week off are. Those hours come out of the denominator, and the pair of rules together is what settles the argument when somebody wants the parts-counter hour to leave with them.

How is productivity different from efficiency?

They use different denominators and they answer different questions. Technician efficiency divides billed hours by the hours the technician spent working on jobs, so it measures speed against book time. Productivity divides billed hours by all available hours, so it measures whether the shop kept the technician fed.

Consider a technician who is handed four hours of work in an eight-hour day and finishes it in three. Efficiency reads 133 percent. Productivity reads 50 percent. Both numbers are correct and only one of them is about the technician.

What drives productivity down?

Waiting. A job sitting unpriced while the advisor works the phone is a technician with an empty bay. A job priced and sent but not yet approved is the same, and it has to stay that way: California's repair act states that "no work shall be done and no charges shall accrue before authorization to proceed is obtained from the customer". A job approved with parts two days out is worse, because now the vehicle occupies the bay as well as the hour.

Read the work in progress list on a slow week and the pattern shows itself. Vehicles waiting on parts, vehicles waiting on a customer callback, vehicles waiting on a supplement. Every one of those is productivity leaking out of a technician who is at work and being paid.

The second driver is dispatch. A shop that hands the hardest diagnostic work to whoever is free instead of whoever is fast burns hours it will never bill.

Wrong parts are the quiet third. A component ordered off a bad lookup arrives, gets opened on the bench and goes straight back to the supplier. The technician who was on that job now has nothing to do while the counter sorts it out. Those hours never appear on any report as lost, because nobody was idle on purpose.

What does an owner do with the number?

Read it next to effective labor rate and hours per repair order, because on their own each of the three can be gamed and together they cannot. Productivity going up while hours per repair order falls means the shop is turning more small tickets. Productivity going up with a steady ticket size means the office got faster.

Track it per technician and per week, and look at the shape rather than the level. A number that swings twenty points week to week is a scheduling story. A number that sits flat and low is a workflow story, and it usually starts at the estimate.

Where does estimating touch productivity?

At the front of every job. The gap between a finished inspection and a priced estimate a customer can approve is dead time on a lift, and in a diesel shop the gap is longer because the parts list is longer. Eight injectors, a set of hardware, a supplier call for each. Nothing about that work is skilled, and all of it happens while a technician waits.

Shops close the gap with canned jobs on repeat work and automated estimating on the rest, which hands the service writer a priced draft to check instead of a blank screen to fill. Whether that moves your productivity number is a thing to measure on your own tickets, with the waiting hours counted before and after.

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