5 Tips for Summertime Production

Repair shops are bursting with instruments this time of year, and they were all due yesterday. To have all your rentals ready, and to make customers happy come August, you need to find ways to increase shop production. Here are five tips to improve your repair shop’s output this time of year.

1. Reduce the number of rental returns your techs have to process. Not every return needs a repair. Assign sales staff to play test every rental return to determine if a repair is needed.

Your techs will need to teach what to watch for like bent keys, broken pads, lost motion, worn strings and open bouts, but the majority of the triage time can be removed from your techs and onto staff that’s not busy over the summer. This same staff should also clean every case and polish instruments after the techs are done with the repair.

2. Keep your techs at their bench. If they’re anywhere else, your production suffers. Road reps can haul repairs to and from the shop. Sales staff can ring up repair invoices. Your shop administrative assistant should be very busy creating supply orders, calling for approvals, and scheduling the workflow to keep customers and store owners happy. This includes scheduling store stock as well as customer repairs. If you remove the administrative tasks and allow the technicians to do what they’re trained to do, your production will increase significantly.

3. Give more responsibility to the prep techs. Local college students are great help in the shop over the summer as prep techs. They can disassemble brass and woodwind instruments for cleanings and then scrub them in the chem room. They can learn how to repair open bouts and restring violins. Your shop’s productivity will significantly increase after a little training from your master tech.

For instance, teach the prep techs how to do port alignments so every chem clean can be finished by them. If they can glue a bout, they can do fingerboard re-glues as well. Teach them to re-round peg holes and lubricate pegs, repair water keys, do case repair, and clean the shop. You want this staff doing as many non-technical tasks as possible so your fully trained repair techs can spend all of their efforts on instruments needing their level of skill.

4. Buy snacks! An effective motivator for any member of your staff is an occasional and sincere “thank you.” Over the summer, your techs are pulling long hours with physical labor. Go buy smoothies once a week and give everyone a break for 10 minutes. Not only will this show your gratitude, it will ensure they take the research-backed break from work in order to increase productivity.

5. Consider units and energy. A first attempt at the math suggests you have “X” number of instruments in the shop and “Y” number of days to get them done, so “X / Y” tells you how many instruments to complete each day. Easy. But this oversimplification misses two key points: not all instruments take the same amount of time nor the same amount of energy. Restringing a violin is not as physically exhausting as removing dents from a sousaphone, nor does it take as long.

You must measure the unit output of the shop to keep things on track, but be sure to prioritize instruments requiring the most energy first. During the second week of August, it’s a lot easier to push 10 clarinets across the bench in a day than it is 10 sousaphones. The physical energy left at the end of the summer should match the work needing to be done in order to maintain quality and production.

Focused attention on your repair staff this time of year goes a long way to having a productive, profitable shop that has all of your rentals ready and customers happy. MI