Bay utilisation: honest hours versus hopeful schedules

Morning slots fill because customers prefer drop-off before work. The schedule then shows 110% utilisation until 11:00 and empty bays after lunch. On paper the day looks full; on the floor technicians rush, advisors apologise, and express jobs steal hours from booked maintenance.

An honest utilisation snapshot separates booked labour hours from clocked productive hours and from waiting-for-parts idle time. Plot those three lines for ten consecutive working days. The shape usually shows the morning crush and the afternoon idle that everyone feels but rarely measures.

Once the shape is visible, the service manager can move a portion of maintenance into late-morning and early-afternoon windows with a small customer incentive—loaner priority or a fixed pickup time. The goal is not maximum theoretical utilisation; it is a day the advisors can explain without constant apologies.

Our Aftersales Performance Review includes this bay snapshot as standard. It keeps the conversation about staffing grounded in the week that just happened, not in a hope that next month’s bookings will somehow level themselves.