“Rather than having a swan desperately paddling behind the scenes, but appearing serene on the surface, aftersales departments should be calm and collected, both in the back office as well as the customer-facing staff.”

As one dealer at the meeting put it: “Our job in the service department can revolve around putting out fires and in turn becoming better firefighters. We often don’t address where things are going wrong between departments.”

Kiff said leading the business with a Lean way of thinking doesn’t just require buy-in from the dealership leaders, it needs to be accepted by everyone working in the business.

“Lean is a different way of thinking. It’s demanding. If it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it,” he said. “Once your business is on this journey, it will be hard. Businesses need to be willing to work at the process and be persistent.”

 

Short-term ‘resource crunch’ can lead to long-term gain

Trenear-Thomas acknowledged there is a resource crunch with dealers looking to adopt a Lean approach to business: “Businesses have to run their standard day-to-day operations in parallel with this new way of working. But there will come a point where the elimination of waste makes everyone more productive, which takes away many of the current challenges of the day for all staff in the business.

“When the workshop is running as efficiently and seamlessly as it can, that’s when you will also see an uplift in how people feel working in the business. Rather than stressed and overworked service advisors, you will have taken out the roadblocks getting in the way of their job.

“If your workshop can plan and repair, it also means your staff can always say yes to customers.”

Kiff said dealership leaders should take the time to stand in the workshop and just observe the details of each operation to see how much time is actually productive.

Some dealers raise the question of balancing this Lean way of working with the requirements imposed by car manufacturers.

Trenear-Thomas said: “It’s far too easy to say the manufacturer won’t allow you to do something. You have to work with them and, if necessary, around them.”

Kiff also said car manufacturers have tried to roll out their own Lean thinking programmes with dealerships before, but it hasn’t worked because it has to be on a dealership-by-dealership basis. Those within the dealership need to develop and adopt the way of thinking themselves.

Even Toyota, the leader in Lean manufacturing processes, hasn’t really succeeded in rolling out Lean in automotive retail on a national basis, according to Kiff.

He said: “You can’t have the solutions presented to you or just copy others. Solutions are individual to the business.

“If we have done our job correctly we will do ourselves out of a job as Lean coaches. We haven’t succeeded in teaching people to think and act differently if we don’t do that.”