Bedrijfsvoering

Garage scheduling that survives the day.

Every workshop has had the day where the ten o clock is still on the ramp at two, three customers are waiting and nobody can find the parts for the afternoon. That day is almost never caused by one bad job. It is caused by a schedule that had no room in it to begin with.

Empty service bays in a clean modern workshop

Book time, not jobs

The root of most garage scheduling problems is booking by job name rather than by realistic duration. A service is not a fixed length; it depends on the vehicle, its condition and what gets found.

The fix is unglamorous: hold your own average durations by job and by vehicle type, from your own history rather than from a book, and let the schedule use those. A workshop that knows a particular job actually takes ninety minutes on a certain type of car stops promising it in an hour.

The moment durations reflect reality, most of the visible chaos disappears, because the schedule stops being a wish list.

Leave room for what you will find

A vehicle in for one thing frequently turns out to need another, and that is a good outcome commercially and a disaster for a schedule with no slack.

Deliberate buffer is the difference between a discovery being extra revenue and being a ruined afternoon. How much depends on your work mix, but the pattern that works is a protected gap in the day rather than padding every job, since padding every job simply reduces capacity and then gets eroded.

The buffer also absorbs the ordinary variance: a late arrival, a part that is wrong, a customer who wants to talk. Without it, one small slip propagates through every remaining job.

Sequence by constraint, not by booking time

Bays, ramps, specialist equipment and individual technicians are all constraints, and they rarely match the order customers booked in.

Group jobs that need the same equipment so it is not being reset repeatedly.
Start the long jobs early, because a long job that starts late has nowhere to overrun into.
Put waiting customers early in the day, where variance has not accumulated yet.
Keep at least one bay flexible rather than committed, for the job that arrives.
Do not schedule a specialist technician back to back if only they can do that work.

This is where a booking system that understands resources beats a diary. A diary can only tell you the time; it cannot tell you that both jobs at eleven need the same ramp.

Parts availability belongs in the schedule

A job scheduled without confirmed parts is not a booking, it is a hope, and it is the single most common cause of a bay standing idle.

The rule worth enforcing is simple: a job only occupies a slot once the parts are confirmed for that day. Everything else sits in a provisional state that customers are told about honestly rather than confirmed and then rearranged.

That connects scheduling to supplier ordering more tightly than most workshops manage. When the two are separate systems maintained by different people, the gap between them is where the wasted bay time lives.

Tell customers the truth about time

Most complaints about a delay are actually complaints about not being told.

A customer given a realistic window and updated when it slips is far more tolerant than one promised an optimistic time and left waiting. That is a scheduling decision as much as a service one: if the schedule is honest, the communication can be too.

It also protects your pricing. A workshop that consistently finishes when it said it would can charge properly, while one that runs late is always apologising with a discount.

Measure the gap between planned and actual

The most useful number in garage scheduling is not utilisation, it is the difference between what you planned and what happened.

Tracking planned against actual duration by job type tells you exactly where the estimates are wrong, and it is usually two or three job types doing most of the damage rather than a general optimism.

Fix those durations and the schedule stabilises without anyone working differently. It is the cheapest operational improvement available to a workshop, and it needs nothing more than recording what actually happened.

Veelgestelde vragen

Why does my garage schedule always fall apart?

Usually because it books jobs rather than realistic durations, and has no deliberate buffer. A vehicle in for one thing often needs another, and with no slack that discovery ruins the afternoon instead of being extra revenue.

How much buffer should a workshop leave?

It depends on your work mix, but a protected gap in the day works better than padding every job. Padding every job reduces capacity and then gets eroded anyway, whereas a real gap absorbs the discoveries and the ordinary variance.

Should I schedule by time or by bay?

By constraint. Bays, ramps, specialist equipment and individual technicians all limit what can run in parallel, and they rarely match the order customers booked in. A diary tells you the time but not that two jobs need the same ramp.

Where does most wasted bay time come from?

Jobs scheduled without confirmed parts. A job only belongs in a slot once its parts are confirmed for that day; everything else should be provisional and communicated as such rather than confirmed and rearranged.

What should I measure to improve scheduling?

The gap between planned and actual duration by job type, rather than utilisation. It is normally two or three job types causing most of the damage, and correcting those estimates stabilises the schedule without anyone working differently.

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