Remarkable Results Radio Podcast Sep 16, 2025

Process Engineering: Six Sigma for Auto Shop Efficiency and Growth [RR 1057]

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This is the Aftermarket Radio Network.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome.

Remarkable results, Radio Carm Capriato.

10 years in it now.

Thank you for your loyal listenership.

So appreciated.

We are excited to have a great episode on process today.

And boy, I've got a great guest.

David Boyd's going to be with us.

He's a six sigma black belt.

Yes.

And he's going to take me on halfway through the episode.

Are we kidding?

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Hey, welcome back.

Hey, David Boyd.

Hello, Carm.

How are you, my friend?

No, it's fine.

I was just thinking about the idea of doing our black belt

sparring around process halfway through the show.

We'll have to...

Yeah, we're going to do that.

Have to go into the octagon.

Yeah, we're going to do that.

David's with callinbound.com,

coolest phone system in the world.

They're a dedicated, high-performing independent shop owner service.

Everything for the independent shop owner.

And a lot of times I walk into shops

and I see the inbound phone systems.

So I know you're everywhere.

But you also have to do some AI powered call analysis

and stuff.

And I just love it.

I had a chance to see it handle spam control on the phones.

And anyway, so here's my think on today's episode.

And I'm connected to the industry.

My ears always to the ground.

I know a ton of friends.

They just call me and say, hey, idea, what about this?

A lot going on.

So the top things, David, that I continue to feel,

I mean, in this moment of time right now, culture,

it goes without saying being a client advocate education,

or as they say, customer service education.

Scaling, financial, recruiting and retention.

But way up on top of the list is processes and systems

and policy way up.

And so many coaches that I talked to that said,

when we can tweak some of the financial things

that are critical in the business.

But what we find out is there's no methodology,

no way of doing things, no consistency.

The processes are broken.

And it looks to me when I talk to people,

says, we don't know how to start.

We tried and then we failed.

And we never really had the discipline

to go forward and keep doing it.

Well, when I found out that David is a six sigma

in processes and systems, I said, come on.

And maybe you can help the shop owner move forward.

And if you will, process engineering.

I love that word, by the way, engineering,

process engineering.

So what the hell is it?

And what's six sigma?

So let's get going.

Six sigma is a process methodology.

And it is designed around understanding first how we work

and then being able to measure that once we understand

the process and can measure the process,

going through a structure of improvement and control.

So there's some terminology that we use it.

Just a quick note about my background.

I grew up in corporate America

and I became a six sigma master black belt in GE.

I worked for a number of years in corporate America

in process engineering.

So I became passionate about process and it's funny

because as you mentioned, processes overlooked often.

It can be even taboo to say, hey, what's your process for this?

It sounds more like a check and balance

as we're running a shop.

What's your process?

Do you have a standard process to find?

What's your SOP?

We hear some of these buzzwords.

Process is actually quite simple

because everything we do is a process.

So when I'm talking about process,

I like to just break it down to the simplest level

which is whatever we're doing,

we're following a process, whether we know it or not.

So if we can just acknowledge that, yes,

we have a process for this,

then we can know it, document it, improve it.

But David, could it be the process of the day?

Because it didn't work like this yesterday.

So today we're going to do it a little different

and then tomorrow maybe have a different flavor.

It's a great point, Karin,

because rapid toggling of process execution

can be really problematic

because then the process is variable.

So if our process is whatever the flavor of the day happens to be,

whatever's quickest or feels right,

then it is an out-of-control process.

I love those two words, rapid toggling.

I think I'm broke.

Well, you're rapid toggling.

To my listener, think about it.

If you can put that in your head, rapid toggling,

that's what's broke.

I don't know if this is skipping ahead in our discussion,

but when we talk about this,

I tend to interact on a process level,

which is just the way that my mind works.

When I'm talking, I'm always evaluating

why is something happening in a particular way.

So when I have a conversation with anybody that owns a business

or lives life or my kids or whatever,

I'm always thinking about what's the process.

So I ask questions like, why do you do that?

Why do you do it that way?

And I'm always listening, Karm, for two key responses

to tell me that I don't know.

If somebody says, why do you do that?

I don't know.

Then we all agree we have a problem.

But I'm always listening when I'm talking about

the way that we do what we do.

And I'm asking, why do you do it that way?

When somebody says, that's how I was taught

or that's the way we've always done it.

Now we have a basis for discussion,

a process discussion.

And it doesn't have to be hard or gross.

We can just simply talk about the way

that something happens in our daily.

So whether it's business or life,

we'll talk probably today about, you know,

in the context of the shop

and why we do certain things the way we do that.

But it's important for your listener to understand,

do we know why we're doing something?

Because we all do stuff

and we're executing process all throughout the day,

whether it's the process of the day

or whether it's something that we do routinely.

Do we know why we're doing it and ultimately what's the outcome?

I believe there's a lot of shops

that do things really, really well.

That's true.

But it's never been documented

and it's never been laid as the law of the land.

It's just next generation,

next iteration of a new specialist in the...

Here's how we do this.

Okay, teach it to me, boom, boom, boom, done.

But there's no why we do it.

Why we do it?

Because, oh, the outcome at the end and the QC thing

and it's really solving the customer's problem

is, oh, my God, it works.

But there's other things in the business that don't work.

And so, you know what I love about this

that just hit me?

If we've got a great process or system,

we can build off the fact that that thing works.

Let's quickly document it,

maybe one page, one and a half pages of why we do this.

There's got to be a how we do this, right?

Why we do this up top,

how we do this down below.

And now saying, this thing is inconsistent.

We're rapid toggling over here.

Let's get together as a team and pull it together.

Do you recommend that people that are on the team

that have a responsibility to this process be involved in it?

Very much so.

What you're talking about is part one of a process methodology.

So in Six Sigma, there's an acronym called DMAIC, D-M-A-I-C,

Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.

What you've just said is really the defined phase

of the process analysis.

So defining that process is talking with the stakeholders.

In process engineering,

we would call those people stakeholders.

We would understand the supplier to a process

and the customer of a process

and we're going to document through

what are we doing and how are we doing it.

So it's very much bringing those people together.

It could be your service advisor, it could be a technician,

it could be an office manager,

but there are people that are involved in that process execution

and it's important to have them part of this

as you're identifying or documenting what the process is.

You cannot effectively document the process

without having the key contributors and stakeholders involved.

In a typical shop, how long?

I guess if, well, here's the process

and how we double check a tire rotation, lug nuts,

there's something on that order and it starts to get,

oh, then you put this thing and then you put the tool back

and can you get to granular?

You can.

I think an important perspective is knowing what is normal.

So when we document a process,

we want to define what we're doing today

so that we can effectively establish normal.

And once we know what normal is,

now we can identify abnormal.

And this is the key that I think goes sideways in a lot of businesses

and a lot of shops is that we don't know what normal is

so we don't know what abnormal is.

The big takeaway from this is establish normal.

It's the commitment of the business, the owner,

the commitment to the customer.

This is how we do what we do, why we do what we do.

Let's list it and that's normal for this particular process.

That's the rapid toggling.

You're going from abnormal to normal,

but you don't know that normal is really right.

That's true.

The way that we've done something may be a defect.

That's another process term that we use in Six Sigma,

is defect.

So we want to be able to identify defects.

That's just another way to say,

how do we identify abnormal?

This does not have to be an overwhelming laborious process.

We don't have to bring the think tank together

and have hours and hours of meetings.

We just simply start at the beginning

and pull in the people that are involved in a process.

It could be appointment setting in your shop.

What's our process?

It could be sales estimates.

What's our process?

It could be the vehicle check-in or check-out.

What is the process?

If we can have the people involved in that,

we can document what we're doing

and now everybody that's involved in that process

knows why we're doing it.

I think in the shop a lot of these things

are going to be based on the why is

operational efficiency and customer experience.

We want to do an effective vehicle check-out process

so that our customer has a high-level experience

every time they interact with us.

It's not variable.

When they call to set the appointment,

we understand what we're trying to accomplish

to maximize my customer's experience.

In this case, the customer is the customer of the process.

In another instance, we may have an internal process

where maybe the technician is the customer of the process

and the service advisor is the supplier to that process.

We need to understand what are the ins and the outs

and just have that documented

so that we understand normally

what are we looking to accomplish,

how do we execute this.

We use a variety of technologies in the shop

as you well know.

Some of these technologies help facilitate our workflow

and some can inhibit our workflow for not careful.

So, David, I love the customer supplier connection

or responsibility.

To me, I think that's a huge part of this episode

to realize when you're going to analyze, find the why

and do the how is...

Who's the customer? Who's the supplier of the process?

Love that piece.

We have done episodes on lean before

and lean is Six Sigma, am I right?

That's correct.

Okay, lean, being lean.

And one episode that we did,

and I do believe it was Christie Hudson,

mapped out an oil change

and the steps that it took to do an oil change.

Get the oil filter, get the oil,

drag this over here, bring in the vehicle,

check this out, do the DV, all this stuff

and it looked like a spaghetti map.

And what they ultimately started to figure out

was they needed to move equipment around

to minimize the steps.

And so, you could sit here,

we can have this show on process,

get it down, make it right, build consistency.

But there's also...

Where are the tools?

I walked into a friend's shop.

He's got a battery charger at every bay.

And I said, Jim, why?

And he said, we did a lean analysis

of every time we needed to go

and get a battery charger

and where it was stored in the back room

and how many steps we had to take and come back.

So there's a lot of people out there

realizing that you can have a great process policy.

We do this before we do that,

and then we do this, and then if not,

there's an ABC choice, boom, bam, bam.

But he's got timers on every lift.

It's amazing how some people get

not only good policy procedure,

but they get really good placement

of material tools equipment.

You asked the number one question

at the start of that story,

which is with the charger at every station, why?

Why is that piece of equipment there

or why is that piece of equipment not there?

If you understand what you're doing

and you can answer that question as an owner,

I love the fact that the owner

was immediately able to answer the why question.

Why do you have that there?

Well, we had some extra money in the budget.

We thought, hey, we'll have it.

Why is because it drives efficiency?

So when we know what we're doing

and we can answer the question of why we're doing it,

now we can identify what is the most efficient

or effective way to do that,

placement of the technicians toolbox,

the way that they are moving from point to point

and starting and stopping various jobs.

Are we waiting on parts

and where the parts are delivered?

How is the technician notified?

Again, it can sound overwhelming

to make this a big jumbled mess of spaghetti-carm,

but when we have a why-questioning outlook

in the shop, now we can begin to

drive greater efficiency

because we're actually asking the process question.

Why is a process question?

And when we ask why and I don't have an answer,

now we have an opportunity to educate.

Maybe educating a technician or a service advisor.

When we do have the answer,

we can ask when we're doing it this way,

what gets in the way?

What are the roadblocks?

What are the bottlenecks?

The owner of the process is generally the shop owner,

maybe a production manager or shop manager,

something of this sort,

but everybody is part of the process.

So anybody who's touching something can be a contributor.

So this isn't a hat that I put on and say,

hey, I'm the process guy today

because if we're looking out and understanding,

there's always an opportunity to improve.

Do I know what we're doing?

Do I know why we're doing it?

And then can I measure what's happening

throughout the execution of my work?

Now we have the basis for really driving efficiency.

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I want to get into measuring

because I think that's a real struggle for people down the line.

But I believe Six Sigma Lean uses the word process mapping

because I did a little research and I have that in front of me.

And that reminds me of why the battery chargers are there,

why they moved oil filters around, you know.

And when I think of that,

the flow is really big and the software that's helping us.

So there's not only workflow screens at our counter

and our service counter,

the workflow screens are in the back,

sometimes with the shop manager.

But I've walked into shops where the screen is like an 80 inch screen.

And I said, why is it so big?

Now everybody can see it.

You know, they're kind of a square four bay operation

and it was kind of up in the center.

And if not, where do you think some specialists in the bays are going?

They're walking over to the small 30 inch screen

so they can actually see what's going on.

But instead of making that, which takes time,

yeah, instead of taking that walk,

making an 80 inch screen.

So it's these little tiny things.

I didn't think of that.

Wow.

And so the process mapping of,

wouldn't it be cool to take the camera,

take a picture every two or three seconds in the shop

and then play it back and says,

why did this guy walk 10 miles today?

Think about it.

The ability to look out into the shop

and see what's happening

and then have the presence of mind to ask,

why is that happening?

I'll give you an example.

I was in a shop.

I worked closely with this owner in operational process areas.

But before I really started doing that,

I was working on their communication system

and spending time at the shop

and really just looking around,

seeing the way that people work.

It's not this process mind that doesn't ever shut off.

So I saw a technician sitting on his little portable stool

and just kind of had this whole hum look on his face.

This is an ATEC, right?

You want to keep these guys busy.

So I had just made this comment,

kind of like a slow day,

that kind of thing and he just shook his head

and I'm like, oh, what are you doing?

It was the why question,

why are you sitting there basically

without asking why you're sitting there.

It was just like, oh, I'm waiting on the approval

and whatever and the service manager

is three estimates deep, all of these things.

So here's this ATEC sitting there,

not able to produce because of a process error.

He knew what he was doing

and he knew why he was basically on pause.

So now this is an opportunity

to go talk to the service advisor

and ask what's happening here.

What the ATEC just told me is your three estimates deep

and it could be another hour

before you're even talking to this customer.

So we go down the process,

just simply looking out and understanding

why is somebody moving from point A to point B

and do they understand,

do I understand as the owner

or the person responsible

as the thought leader in this environment

why they're doing that?

Can we address that area of inefficiency?

Why is this technician just sitting here?

Do we have the work?

Yeah, we have the work.

He's just waiting on an approval.

What can we do to streamline that?

So that led into a whole area of process analysis

that said what can we do

to actually compress the time from inspection to approval

and we were able to pilot a program

and drive greater efficiency

in leveraging additional resources

within the organization to compile the estimate,

take the inspection,

compile the estimate,

get that to the customer

and minimize that time

even affect the parts ordering process.

So from the time that the inspection is complete,

we get that back to the service advisor.

They prepare the estimate

and order the parts,

then call the customer.

Those parts are already on the way.

Now we've compressed the timeline

because we have additional resources

able to complete that process

and we've also moved forward

the implementation of our vendor process

to get those parts in.

So now this drives a lot of efficiency.

Ultimately it keeps our ATEC busy

and then who's the end customer

is our actual customer.

They get their vehicle on time

or ahead of time.

So we have the opportunity to wow them

instead of delay them.

These are the things that

when we talk about process,

a simple question can turn into this

like I had no idea that we were waiting

on getting three estimates complete

before we keep my ATEC busy.

Who said I had no idea?

The owner.

The owner, okay.

And again, let's go back to manage

by walking around

or having those daily huddles

which can expose a lot of this stuff.

And when I'm thinking of the word measurement

because it's very difficult,

how do I measure that?

My God,

bay or technician efficiency

for the hours that they spend

or that bay can actually produce revenue.

That's not hard to figure that out.

David,

I got to believe one of the biggest

most important takeaways from this

is to start having

and question your people

in your daily huddles.

How often, every day,

do you think you're standing around?

Now, a lot of it has to do with pay.

A person's on a salary,

they don't give a damn.

But if it's a hybrid pay system

where they get paid X,

but they earn because of these other

measures that they have,

meaning that you've got to

contribute be productive.

You walk into businesses and their counters,

they have a CSR, customer service rep,

that's greeting the customer

and starting up tickets.

But a lot of the heavy work is done

behind curtains

or behind the counter

where people don't get interrupted so much

that they can really, really hammer it out.

You've touched on something

that I would call key performance indicators.

And we use KPIs

within the industry.

We use that in process engineering as well.

And I think throughout the industry,

I see a lot of owners and managers

that understand KPIs

and they can go into their

shop management system, perhaps,

or whatever they're using for reporting

and pull out ARO.

They can pull out any number

of various metrics.

And I would challenge them

to say,

do we understand what levers you pull

as an owner or

manager that influences

those KPIs?

I think that's where

the wheels begin to come off the bus

is taking the fact

that I can access

a metric or a measurement

and know, okay, I know this number.

I know my numbers. I know my ARO.

I know my car count. I know these things.

And then do I also

know which levers I can pull

that influence these?

And how do I learn these things?

Well, again, I go out into the shop.

I spend time observing.

I have in the back of my mind,

I want to watch for key

behavior in the shop,

or I want to just occasionally ask

questions. The morning huddles are a great time to do that.

If you're not having a morning huddle, please do that.

Stay in tune with

the people in the shop.

And if you are having that,

in addition to the morning huddle,

are there moments or opportunities throughout the day

to walk around? If you're managing,

there's this idea of walk around management.

It's as applicable

to our industry in automotive repair

as it is in corporate America,

where walk around management is

common in a lot of organizations.

This becomes important. And why do we want to do that?

Well, we want to walk around to understand

and take the pulse and stay in touch

with what is happening so that I'm not

just sitting in my office pretending

that everything's great and everything's moving along

just fine. And I look at my KPIs

on my SMS and I feel like,

yep, we're doing great. But all the while,

we have these potential areas

of missed opportunity.

So as I'm out engaging

aware of the workflow and the process,

now I can apply these simple

process tools.

If I can leave your listener-carm with the idea

that process doesn't have to be scary,

it just has to be talked about,

then we're all moving the needle here.

This is about sustainable improvements

to the business. And it's an objective,

it's a goal, it's almost a

must-do, it's a responsibility.

I've said in the past

and I think this episode is helping

justify when I say

get your antenna up,

Mr. Owner, get your intuition

connected to your antenna

and manage by walking around

or walk around management.

And when you see the data

that you as an owner need

to understand and know and say

I'm not sure what this really means

or why isn't it as good as it was

last month, etc. etc.

Then going out with your

observation antenna

out, you usually can

find a problem. And a lot of it is

if it's a company that's already got their

systems down, they've got some great

processes, a lot of people put

them up online. It doesn't mean that

because we did this

last year, that it doesn't need

to be looked at again.

Well, we added a new piece of

equipment. We added another bay.

We have a new person from the outside

just joining us. Someone from a

customer came in. They have

mentality of process that

oh, that's how we did it over there.

And sometimes things break

down. It's almost

like the maintenance of

a vehicle. It has to be done.

It very much has to be done.

Process analysis

and improvement is a cyclical process.

I'm using the word

process to define process, right?

So in Six Sigma

Domaic, I mentioned

earlier, define, measure, analyze, improve

control. Control

puts us not into status quo.

It puts us into the next

phase of define. So we're

going to go back to the beginning.

We're going to understand

what we do. We're going to measure that,

improve this process by making

data driven decisions.

And ultimately we get into a control

phase. Well, control just means

we're operationally

working at our new level,

right? So we were working here.

Now we're going to raise the bar. We've made

data driven decisions. We've improved

our process. Everybody's on board.

We know what we're doing. We know why we're

doing it. And we know who feeds

what I'm doing and who benefits from what

I'm doing, right? The supplier and customer.

Now in control, we're going to come back

to the beginning. So we're

going to do this process, this new

improved process for 30, 60,

90 days and then

go kind of go back to the

measure side of it, right?

Are we actually realizing these

results? Has our process

improvement proven?

Or have we introduced something that was a variable

we didn't identify? Because we know

what it should look like.

Now we know what a defect is or what

abnormal is. But this is

a circular process. In my opinion,

this is never a one and done.

We're never going to just do something, say

check. I have my book now

and good. When somebody asks

me if I have my SOPs or

my process is defined. Yep,

I got it. This becomes

a part of how we work and how we run

our businesses. I love the words

perpetual loop.

Yeah. It describes just what you said

that you need. It's almost

like once you get done

either reviewing or creating

a process and

now I'm just going to throw a number out. You got

40 of them out there

because of all these different types

and styles of

situation old jobs

responsibilities. It's

we got this done.

Whoops.

You may have to go back and visit something you did

three months ago because of a change

in the business. You may have to go back

because one of the brainiacs

in the back says this isn't working

any more. We got

a new piece of equipment. We have some new technology

that shortens that loop, if you

will, in going from

A to step C. Now we don't need B

and I love

your point this whole

it's like paying attention to KPIs in finance

as an owner.

Almost needs to be someone

anointed

to be the process person

and I'll bet you you can find someone in the company.

Now if you're three or four base shop it's not

going to happen. You own it. You're the owner.

You are the owner. You're the process owner and the business owner.

I mean I know there's people

with shop foreman, shop managers,

area managers.

It's almost like the responsibility needs to get

inside but if an area manager is managing

three or four stores each

and it's a six or eight, ten store

chain, they need to work together.

Someone may identify this.

Our building is a little different size

a little different format.

We have long base instead of square

base. It's like

this doesn't work in this

particular place and it may work somewhere

else. Thank you for bringing it up

and you talk about when in the war

you know processes

they win wars. Policies win

wars against yourself

and the competition and the marketplace.

He brought up a super important

point right now and I'm glad you did

because you talked about change

management. The idea

take an MSO

and the idea that okay

you'll run into this right where somebody

says that process works for them but it doesn't work

for us and let me tell you all the reasons why

it doesn't work here. It's a little bit of

not from my camp mentality

and this is why early

on we talked about

bringing in the people involved in the process

these might be subject matter experts

they might be key contributors

they might be individual process owners

within the MSO

environment.

Who's the foreman at location one

and who's the foreman at location two

and are they all part of this

because almost without exception

a business process

is going to be

portable from one location

to the second location to the third location

when people are

on board with that and change management is

super important so this is now where I want

to bring in my subject matter

experts and you know

I'll call them local process owners

to be part of this

so that we understand

ultimately they're going to be charged

with taking what we learn

and what we know about process

execution back to their

local

managing that and implementing it

because we don't want people

this is a defect area

where we have people say okay

this process was built for that location

it doesn't work here because of XYZ

so I'm not going to adopt it

and then without even saying

I'm going to check out

they've checked out without effective and proper change management

we don't have the ability to

implement, maintain and manage control

across multiple

locations in certain cases

so this comes back

to really making people understand that they own this

if there is variability

from one location to another location

that's okay but that can be accounted

in our process documentation

but we have to know why

we can't just have somebody say

that won't work here because

if they can articulate

why and understand

is it actually different or

is it the same but because you have

7,000 square feet

and this location has 2,500 square feet

you think it won't work

or can we actually drive greater

benefit because of these variables

this is important, change management

is important as our organization

is larger and we have

10, 20 locations

getting those area managers

the location managers, the shop foremen

from each of those locations part of this

becomes that much more important

because now they have that sense of ownership

and when people own

their piece of the picture

they're ready to go back now and engage

and make that change

real at their location

thank you for that, change management

look I'm going to sum up the episode

with this one particular concept

and that is over the 10 years that I've been

podcasting and getting to know so many people

you mentioned MSO, multi shop operations

and people wanting to scale

what I learned about 8 years ago

so how was that store number 2

we never hit our processes

and systems down

well how did store 3 go

it wasn't as good because we never fixed them

and then we finally got

slapped upside the head

found an accountability partner or a coach

we got our stuff together

now we're at 10 stores but we're stupid

we grew without any disciplines

we grew without any systems

and processes

and those are the people that would say

oh my god David you know

Six Sigma Lean it's so important

even if you have a one

up store operation

you'll find out how much more efficient

it's all about the satisfied

the client experience

done at the end of the day

you want a wheel to come off

oh how many wheels have come off down the road

3 or 4 blocks away

it's because you don't have a process in a system

so cover in a few remaining minutes

the importance

that you can't scale

if you don't have great systems

processes

it's the practice ground

we never despise small beginnings

everybody starts at the beginning

some of the biggest shop owners

that I know today that are

20 plus locations

they started renting a bay

it's funny you say that because

I've talked with those owners too

we joke that

store is the hardest until you add

the third store

because now we really

expose

the inefficiency

what we're saying from a process standpoint is

we're really exposing the defects

because I don't know the process

I can't measure it

I don't know what normal looks like

so I am not able to identify abnormal

and then what happens

the oil leaks out within 3 miles of the store

or the wheel comes off on the highway

these are not just dissatisfying

factors that affect a customer

they're

potentially dangerous considerations

we want our customers happy

and of course we want them safe

so we start at the beginning

and understand that today

I'm going to

look and identify a process area

to understand better

that's really what this comes down to

in my opinion Karm

if I take a moment

the shops that are having the morning huddle

there are different names for these

that are used throughout the industry

those are just conscious decisions

that we're going to allocate this period of time

each day

we're going to accomplish something as a group

similarly in process analysis

and process improvement

I'm the owner of a shop

I'm going to make a conscious decision that each day

I'm going to evaluate what's going on around me

and try to better understand

why people are doing what they're doing

to gravitate in a lot of cases

to a path of least resistance

in their own mind and that doesn't mean

that they're doing something effectively or efficiently

and this is where we see that rapid

tackling of process execution

so when I make that decision

I'm the thought leader for the business

and that just means that

I need to stay in front of what's happening

and evaluate

a process area

make a decision to talk with

the people that are involved with that

who's doing what

what are the inputs and the outputs of a particular process

ultimately I'd like to document that

and measure this so that we can make some improvements

around that

this begins to train a pattern of behavior

and you'll actually

my feeling is that

owners that make this commitment to decision

will begin to get energized

by process improvement

I've seen it happen before

they are intrigued like

I can actually cut seven minutes

off of a particular service

from that

certainly our shop

we have more throughput capability

the customer

potentially getting their vehicle back sooner

my technician

who is flat rate

versus salary

they're going to benefit from doing something

seven minutes faster

because we've defined some efficiency

we have discernible

measurable process

that is ideally without defect

so my customer's safety

is elevated and I can stand

by my commitment and guarantee

that they're going to be satisfied with

coming to us and they'll come back again

so these are all the things that happen

and this begins to grow

I do feel that the owners

and process owners

will begin to get encouraged and excited about this

and as you drive

efficiency in your shops

as you drive reduction of defects

your service advisors become more happy

your technicians

your CSR

the managers

and you have growth potential

it's intoxicating

well for a guy like me

who's driven by process

I call it my love language car

we talk process right

so it really becomes invigorating

and I think that it's like the challenge

I'm going to go find something

I'm going to ask

an extra question today

just to hear somebody's response

do they know why they're doing something

unbelievable

thank you so much

a couple of my big takeaways is of course

ask why

the rapid toggling is

unbelievable

the loop

the perpetual loop that we get into

needing to establish

normal and processes

without defect

wow

David Boyd

Aline Six Sigma

Black Belt worked at GE years ago

which is where all this came

to you from

but you had the brain

that was perfect for it

because you eat and live processes

David Boyd from

callinbound.com

great phone company

one of the sponsors on the aftermarket radio network

this was enlightening

thank you so much now

if you listen or learn anything

please go implement it

and whatever you do

please

please do it well

thanks for being on board

to listen and learn

from the premier automotive aftermarket podcast

until next time

About this episode

David Boyd, a Six Sigma Black Belt, joins Carm Capriato to explore the importance of process engineering in automotive shops. They discuss how understanding and documenting processes can lead to improved efficiency and customer satisfaction. Boyd emphasizes the need for shop owners to engage their teams in defining processes, measuring performance, and continuously improving workflows. The conversation highlights the significance of asking 'why' to identify inefficiencies and the role of key performance indicators in driving operational success. This episode is packed with actionable insights for shop owners looking to enhance their business operations.

Dodge Charger

Original notes

Thanks to our Partners, NAPA Auto Care and NAPA TRACS Watch Full Video Episode

David Boyd, Six Sigma Black Belt, emphasizes that defined processes and systems are essential for shop efficiency and growth. Every task follows a process, whether recognized or not, and “rapid toggling” (doing the same job differently each day) leads to chaos.

Key Insights:

Define Processes: Ask “Why do you do it that way?” to uncover gaps and create consistency.
Use DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control, establish “normal” and fix what’s “abnormal.”
Apply Lean Thinking: Reduce wasted motion and idle time (e.g., proper tool placement, faster approvals).
Link KPIs to Action: Observe workflows directly (“management by walking around”), not just reports.
Commit to Continuous Improvement: It’s a loop, not a one-time fix.
For MSOs: Scaling requires standardized systems and local accountability.

The payoff: higher efficiency, stronger customer experience, productive technicians, fewer mistakes, and sustainable growth.

David Boyd, https://www.callinbound.com/

Thanks to our Partners, NAPA Auto Care and NAPA TRACS Learn more about NAPA Auto Care and the benefits of being part of the NAPA family by visiting https://www.napaonline.com/en/auto-care NAPA TRACS will move your shop into the SMS fast lane with onsite training and six days a week of support and local representation. Find NAPA TRACS on the Web at http://napatracs.com/ Connect with the Podcast:

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Carm Capriotto, AAP

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