Service departments are busy. Technicians move from vehicle to vehicle, advisors juggle customers, and parts departments fulfill requests and stock parts.
From the outside, it can look like every minute is accounted for. But in a busy shop, some of the biggest productivity losses can come from moments that barely register: a technician walking to the parts counter, waiting for a part to be picked, talking with someone along the way, and making the trip back to the bay. One trip might take only a few minutes. Multiply that across dozens of technicians and hundreds of trips, and those minutes can quietly turn into hours.
That’s exactly what
Damon Egan, service director at Sherwood Ford, wanted to understand. Rather than assume where time was being lost, his team studied it. They asked a group of technicians to track their movements throughout the day, recording the time spent walking, waiting, and dealing with the interruptions that come with getting parts.
What they found was eye-opening.
Time that seemed insignificant in the moment could add up to hours of downtime over the course of a day. And with increasingly complex vehicles requiring more diagnostics, programming, and research, technicians were already under more pressure than ever to make the most of their time.
The question then became: What could be taken off their plate?
Parts movement was an obvious place to look. Technicians are hired to diagnose and repair vehicles, yet getting parts to the bay has traditionally fallen to them as well. Sherwood Ford began looking for a way to keep that process moving without pulling technicians away from their work.
That led the dealership to
Relo®, a robotic parts runner that moves parts throughout the service department. Instead of leaving a bay to collect parts, technicians can request what they need and have it delivered directly to them, while used parts, cores, and other items can make their way back through the same process.
Six months in, the dealership had numbers to show for the change. In one month alone, Sherwood Ford recorded 437 technician trips saved, representing 53 hours of recovered technician time and nearly $8,000 in potential labour value based on its effective labour rate. But perhaps more telling was the change in attitude.
Technicians initially met the idea with skepticism, not convinced a robot could fit into their day-to-day workflow. Once they experienced not having to walk across the shop carrying parts, that skepticism began to disappear. What started as a technology experiment became another part of the shop’s workflow and, according to Egan, a way to give technicians more time to focus on the work in front of them.
For dealerships looking for opportunities to improve service department productivity, the lesson may not be about robots at all. It’s about paying attention to the minutes that are easy to overlook. Where are technicians waiting? Where are they walking? What tasks pull them away from the vehicle? Those small interruptions can become surprisingly expensive when repeated hundreds of times. Sometimes, improving productivity doesn't mean asking your team to work faster. It means finding ways to remove the things that keep them from working in the first place.
Want to see how Sherwood Ford approached the challenge?
Watch the full conversation with Damon Egan, Paul Powell, and Greg Uland to hear how the dealership identified wasted time, implemented a new approach to parts movement, and measured the results.
