By Mike Davey
Hamilton, Ontario — June 27, 2017 — Wednesday may be the single best time for you to sit down and catch up with the results from our latest survey. The survey asked our readers to let us know which day of the week at their facilities was busiest, and Wednesday drew the fewest responses, with just 3 percent of respondents indicating this was their busiest day.
Collision Repair magazine runs new surveys every week on a variety of topics. The surveys usually consist of just a few multiple choice questions and can be completed in less than two minutes. You can take our latest survey on NACE Automechanika 2017 at this link.
The prevailing wisdom is that a collision centre is at its busiest on Mondays (when cars come in) and Fridays (when cars go out). Our survey results seem to bear this out. The busiest day for the majority of shops (59 percent) was Monday, followed by Friday at 24 percent. Tuesday and Thursday were in a tie for third place, drawing 7 percent of responses each.
A number of respondents chose “other” as their response and provided a bit of commentary. The answers are intriguing and seem to point out that work can be done to level the load across all weekdays. As always, comments are presented anonymously and with only minimal editing from us.
“We schedule cars in on a balanced schedule and deliver roughly the same amount each day.”
“We actually concentrate on scheduling the same number of arrivals and deliveries of vehicles each day. However, on some weeks Friday is still the busiest day.”
The survey then asked readers if they typically ran more than one shift. Most of the respondents (56 percent) don’t, but 24 percent do occasionally and a further 20 percent run like this all the time.
One of the comments we received for this question noted that the facility runs two paint shifts. This makes sense. The booth is often the biggest bottleneck, and it makes sense to use it to its maximum capacity. Another comment pointed out that certain staff start at 6 a.m. and leave at 3 p.m., with other staff starting and finishing later in the day.
Finally, our survey asked readers to indicate which season was the busiest overall. The prevailing wisdom says “winter” and again this is mostly on track with our results, with 42 percent of respondents indicating it was the busiest season of all. Spring was up next, probably because of the high incidence of storms, coming in at 29 percent. A total of 19 percent of readers indicating summer was their busiest season, while fall only garnered 10 percent of responses.
Some survey respondents indicated that they were “busy all year long,” while others noted that while they used to have a busy season, it seems to have spread out in recent years to cover the entire year. We’ve certainly seen some unusual climactic events in recent years, which may help to account for that variation.
Collision Repair magazine’s next survey takes a look at NACE Automechanika 2017 and should take less than two minutes to complete. You can participate in that survey at this link and make sure to watch collisionrepairmag.com next Wednesday for the results!
