If space is tight, you will need to use some form of traffic barricade and prominent signage so that your customers get the right idea. Investing in a few different styles of traffic barricades could help you zone your areas and make those areas easier to see, not only for your customers but also for your workers.
Segregate Employee Parking
Of course, if your business is running well, then you will have just as many vehicles going back to their owners as you do coming in. When it comes to customer collections, it tends to be a case of the customer coming in as and when they can rather than booking collection time slots. This means a vehicle could wait a few hours to be collected.
If you are running an immensely busy garage that deals with a whole host of different vehicle-based services, you may find that there are times when it takes far too long to move jobs around to get to the right one.
Having a designated collection area will keep your yard tidy; it will also mean that your reception employees will be able to deal with your customers rather than having one of your higher-paid employees, such as your mechanics, having to move away from work to ferry a vehicle around your site because the owner has decided to collect at an inopportune moment.
Last Words
You will also need to organize your working area to ensure your workers are doing their best. Of course, this means that they should all have the tools and equipment available to perform their daily duties without having to beg, borrow, or steal from neighboring workers. As you can probably imagine, this can ruin the time frames of not just the one employee who is looking for the right tooling or equipment but also the employee who has suddenly become light on the equipment that they may require.
· Cordon off working bays
This is when it would be a far better idea to spend a weekend organizing your site so that your workers can complete their job lists quickly and move through their work quota with ease.
Designate a Customer Parking Area
You likely have a little bit of a backlog in work, which can be due to employee sickness or unforeseen absenteeism or jobs taking far too long to finish due to their exploratory nature. This will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect throughout your site, so it is key that your employees and their workloads stay well organized.
When your site is well stocked up with jobs to do, the last thing you want is for your customers (like those who prefer to just drive in rather than ring in) to park amongst your jobs and ‘to-do’ vehicles. So, setting up a few designated parking bays for these customers well away from your working vehicles and those of your employees is a good idea.
These barricades can ensure there is never any confusion about what each area is for and where cars should and shouldn’t be and provide more safety. Make use of them in your workshop today.
Of course, from time to time (probably at the end of the working day – depending on what cars were scheduled for the next day), the other vehicles may all need to move forward along the queue. However, this is a task that can be made far quicker when all your employees are involved (or at least the number required) rather than just one car hopping between jobs.
Work on hold
Your employees are likely to work long hours, and although they may want to leave your site on their lunch breaks, they will otherwise be parked on site all day. You are not going to want your employees to use the valuable spaces put aside for your customers, nor will you want them parking in a manner that will hinder the day’s workload from getting completed. So, it stands to reason that you should also segregate an area specifically for employee parking.
You will also need to designate a work on hold bay for jobs that are waiting for parts or can’t be returned to the customer in the time frame provided. Having them stored in a working bay could mean that you have an employee unable to complete any other tasks, which is not good for your business.
When you have finished creating your working bays, you need to address the area of your yard and the vehicles that are stationed there.
Work waiting to be performed
Having this area cordoned off from the rest of your working site will enable your employees to see at a glance if something requires chasing up rather than the vehicle sitting dormant and forgotten amongst the vehicles waiting to have work performed.