Track: Lean

Abstract

Customers bringing their automobiles for maintenance services at one local automobile service station experience long waiting times.  The service station normally is overwhelmed with complaints from customers due to understaffing, lack of standard work procedures, and staff training, which lead to poor service quality.  It is the goal of this study to analyze and redesign the service workflow of this service station in order to reduce service time and meet industry standards.  Fish-bone diagram, 5s Activities, as well as ECRS, are used to not only analyze the root cause of delays and customer complaints but also reduce and eliminate waste in the service procedure. A new service workflow has been introduced by reducing the number of steps to serve customers from 30 to 15.  The standard time for the whole procedure is calculated based on the proposed procedure, which is reduced from 77 minutes to 52 minutes.