S ER V I C E D E P AR TMENT
fruit." Let's look at how we can grab that low hanging fruit. Over-scheduling increases customer
wait times. That's why people hate contrac- tors. Most companies either pre-schedule too much work or not enough. This reduces customer satisfaction and increases costs. In addition to increasing customer wait time, over-scheduling results in excessive over- time, increased technician fatigue, increased dispatcher stress, and increased callbacks. Under-scheduling results in idle time for technicians. Both errors are costly. Forecast your workload. It can be done.
There is a relationship between the weather (and a few other factors) and the amount of same day service emergencies. Once you know the relationship, you can forecast tomorrow's workload to keep your cus- tomers happier and to reduce your costs. Forecasting your workload will help you
decide: 1) How much work to pre-schedule on a given day—whether to reschedule some non-urgent calls or to find work to fill in the schedule, and 2) How much staff to line up for weekend and holiday coverage.
ESTIMATE FASTER AND MORE ACCURATELY Another reason that people hate contractors is because many are not good at estimating. Many show up to survey the job and then either send the proposal out weeks later or not at all. This wastes the customer's time as well as the contractor's time. Additionally it paints the contractor as unprofessional, thus, reducing the chance of getting the job. Worse than losing the job, is losing the fuel account, which can happen if the job goes to another fuel company. The way to estimate quickly is to reduce
all the decisions to a series of "menu items." Create a survey questionnaire to prompt the gathering of all necessary information. Then create a menu of all the incremental costs. The example on page 16 came from a spreadsheet that actually recalculates prices as input costs and margins change. Appropriate prices will vary based on your costs and profit margins. The benefit of this process is that it is consistent, fast, and easy to delegate. When
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I was a service manager, I could easily give my survey (not shown) to any of my techni- cians and get the same answers. It took me 10 minutes to price and then another 5 minutes to fill out our standardized pro- posal form (also not shown). Our customers had the proposal by the next
day—sometimes the same day. We wasted fewer hours estimating jobs because the surveys were faster and as a result we won a greater percentage of the bids. l FON
David Visaggi, president of Inside Oil Consulting, is an operation- al specialist for fuel retailers and mechanical service companies. He can be reached at david@insideoil.com; www.insideoil.com.
