Automotive News Canada - April 2019 - F25

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

ASBURY

Parts counter
employee Vince
Abell opens a
wooden locker in
Courtesy Toyota's
men's locker
room.

continued from previous page

"We just love it when we walk into the locker
room," says Jose Flores, a Brandon Toyota
shop foreman. "We imagined we'd get something like a gym class locker room, but this is a
very, very nice place to take a break.
"Asbury didn't cut any corners," he told
Fixed Ops Journal. "We have nice wood lockers, not metal, and they're more spacious. The
restrooms are larger, too."
Unlike the shop at its predecessor store, the
service department is air conditioned, which
Flores calls "an A-plus addition."
The department's design, layout and equipment reflect input from Asbury employees nationwide, gathered during town hall meetings
the executive team holds annually at every
dealership, as well as through employee surveys. The dealership group even uses exit interviews with departing workers to solicit
comments about facilities, Brand says.
"At the town halls, we do dealership walkthroughs," says Brand, a former service manager and technician. "These facility evaluations provide us with a ton of feedback."
Service employees expressed two priorities
during the fact-gathering process, Brand says:
nicer break areas and better designed shops
that can handle work flow more efficiently.
"If a car comes in here and leaves there,
does that flow right?" he says. "We also wanted to position equipment so technicians can
do their jobs without unnecessary delays and
without expending more effort than needed."

Centralized parts
Traditionally, parts departments are on one
side of the service bays, forcing some technicians to walk all the way across the shop. Centralizing the parts desk at the new dealership
reduces delays, Brand says. To improve productivity further, some maintenance parts -
such as oil filters, cabin air filters and wiper
blades - are stocked in technicians' bays.
The service department's two five-level tire
carousels are among Flores' favorite improvements. Each carousel holds 250 tires organized
by size. To fulfill requests for tires, an employee
types a part number. The rotating rack transports the correct tires, essentially at eye level.
The dealership previously stacked tires on
shelves. That made it hard to find the rightsize tires quickly, Flores says. The carousels
are about 10 feet from the tire-changing room;
tires used to be stored 100 to 150 feet away.
"We used to wait maybe 20 to 30 minutes to
get tires," Flores says. "Now it takes only 10 to

Creature comforts

Asbury Automotive Group's Courtesy
Toyota dealership in suburban
Tampa-St. Petersburg features
amenities aimed at enhancing working
conditions for service technicians.
These are some of the upgrades,
which Asbury plans to roll out at
several other of its 83 dealerships.
 Technician locker rooms with wooden
lockers and leather chairs
 Large-screen TV and Xbox gaming
console
 Larger restrooms
 Air conditioning in the shop and
locker rooms
 A parts department in the center of
the shop, providing easy access for
technicians
 Tire carousels for more organized
storage and faster tire retrieval
 More tire and tire-balancing
machines
 Wheel wings on car lifts to minimize
back strains while technicians
change tires
Source: Asbury Automotive Group

15 minutes."
The department now has four tire machines
and four tire-balancing machines, twice as
many as the old dealership, Flores adds. "We
don't have to wait in line anymore," he says.

Investment, not spending
Brand says Courtesy Toyota's technicians
have reacted positively to the service department enhancements. He declined to say how
much more it costs to design and equip a department this way, but noted that Asbury views
the upgrades as investments rather than costs.
"Making our technicians more efficient with

a state-of-the-art facility is not an expense," he
says. "It's an investment that will more than
pay off in the long term."
Flores says he already has seen how the enhancements can help attract technicians.
"When we interview new hires, they're
amazed," he says. "They just love the way everything is laid out. They see that when this
shop was designed, Asbury really focused on
the technicians."
Asbury hired the Atlanta architecture firm
Praxis3 to help design the service facilities at
the new Courtesy Toyota. Brand says he expects the enhancements and improved efficiencies to increase service customer satisfaction as well.
"More than anything else, customers value
time," he says. "They want to get in and get out
as fast as possible. So efficiencies in fixed ops
are important."
Amenities for service employees such as
those found at Courtesy Toyota should be
"par for the course" industrywide if dealerships hope to retain technicians, says Mark
Smith, COO of San Antonio-based Principle
Auto Group, which owns seven dealerships in
Texas, Mississippi and Tennessee. Smith has
been a vocal advocate of improved facilities
for technicians.
Principle dealerships feature locker rooms for
male and female technicians, with mahogany
lockers, granite countertops, big-screen TVs
and drink stations with free soda, Gatorade and
other beverages, Smith says. The group's BMW
of San Antonio dealership offers a workout facility for service employees, he adds.
"Too many dealerships think about technicians last," Smith says. "You have to create an
environment where they want to be. If you
don't have these kinds of amenities and
you're not willing to pay above market rate
and don't create a great culture, you just won't
get technicians. If you try to compete without
those things, it gets pretty ugly." 

APRIL 2019

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Automotive News Canada - April 2019

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