It’s important for readers to understand that CAPs itself cannot, and therefore doesn’t, record or store any such cycle time data. However, the CAPS raw data output could be transmitted to any new third party business cycle time application service provider, once suitable approvals had been sought by the work provider and individual bodyshop owners of that data, in order to continue a healthy industry debate.
The industry’s average accident to completion (A2C) and K2K cycle time is around 15 and 11 days respectively in the UK, down from over 25 days. The lead time from accident to starting the repair is, on average, still a surprising six days, with a further seven to eight days being in the bodyshop. This is for an average repair job that, if it were able to be worked on continuously, would only take two days from start to finish.
At a time when most bodyshops are short of work why do we still have any lead time? Because work providers continue to send much of their work within the network to bodyshops that cannot do the work immediately, instead of to someone else who can.
Once a work provider’s bodyshop network is online, the technology for automated work direction and capacity management is a very simple application that could reduce this lead time to one or two days.
Back to basic average cycle times... once on site, why does it still take an average of six days to repair the car rather than the two days an average 10-12 hour job should take in continuous effort? Generally, because of administrative process waste and duplication, plus inevitable parts delays, the repair itself becomes a multiple stop go process.
For perhaps 200+ of the top UK bodyshops performance is substantially better than the average. But even these are still someway short of what could be achieved with an automated, online and, most importantly, a trusting and collaborative best-in-class business partnership process, between the bodyshop and work provider(s).
Many of today’s potential solutions to sustainable K2K cycle time improvements rely on anecdotal evidence and, often as a consequence, do not have the quantitative business case to support needed for investment in the new change management processes. These changes also require significant collaborative working between bodyshops and their work providers, since most of the historically longer component cycle times are a result of both work providers and bodyshops not doing something right first time, or simply being suboptimal in their business rules and processes.