| name | technician-productivity-and-efficiency |
| description | Diagnose a repair shop's labor throughput with the three distinct dials: productivity (clocked/available), efficiency (billed/clocked), and proficiency (billed/actual). Match dispatch to skill, read them separately, and fix the right one. Benchmarks verify-at-use; no PII. |
Technician Productivity & Efficiency
Billed hours — the input to labor gross profit — come from technicians who are present, busy, and fast. Those are three different measurements, and prescribing without knowing which one is low wastes the fix.
Advisory, operations decision-support. Productivity/efficiency/proficiency benchmark ranges are volatile and shop-specific — every target here is [verify-at-use] against the shop's own baseline. No customer PII.
The three dials (never blend them)
| Dial | Formula (concept) | Reads | If low, look at |
|---|
| Productivity | clocked hours / available hours | Is the tech on a job at all? | Dispatch, car count, parts-hold, idle time |
| Efficiency | billed (flagged) hours / clocked hours | Is the tech beating flag time? | Skill match, tooling, information/labor-guide access |
| Proficiency | billed hours / actual hours on the job | True speed vs the guide | Training, diagnostic process, comebacks |
The rule: diagnose the specific dial before prescribing. A tech at 100% efficiency but 60% productivity is idle, not slow — a dispatch/car-count problem, not a skills problem. A busy shop with low efficiency has a throughput problem, not a capacity problem.
Dispatch to skill
Match job difficulty to tech level (master/general/lube or A/B/C). A diagnostic on a junior bench is slow and comeback-prone; an oil change on the A-tech is billable expertise thrown away. Dispatch discipline is often the cheapest productivity gain in the building.
Metrics
| Metric | Reads | Note |
|---|
| Productivity % | clocked / available | Low → dispatch, staging, or car-count gap |
| Efficiency % | billed / clocked | The labor-GP multiplier [verify-at-use] |
| Proficiency % | billed / actual | Training/tooling signal |
| Hours billed per tech per day | billed hours / techs | The floor's output number |
Anti-patterns
- Reporting one blended "productivity" number that hides which dial is broken.
- Adding a tech to fix low efficiency (a throughput problem, not a headcount one).
- Leaving the A-tech on lube work because they're reliable.
See also
