FEATURE LOAD BALANCING FOR TECH EFFICIENCY While Also Reconditioning Inventory for Pre-Owned Vehicle Profitability L oad balancing has critical implications for inventory turn - and thus, service tech efficiency. Ignoring load balancing can leave service techs either jammed up or idling. We in the car business face the reality that great techs are not around every corner. Really good technicians are hard to find. As department heads, you want to do everything in your power to ensure that your techs are efficient and not frustrated by too much or too little work to do. LOAD BALANCING AND RHYTHM IN PRE-OWNED VEHICLE RECONDITIONING Load balancing is also crucial to the productivity of the used vehicle reconditioning side of fixed ops. Why? Inventory availability is thin. The buying cadence has internal service work bottlenecked one day and empty the next. Workload balancing will even out the work inflow - and also the output - so the reconditioning rhythm remains constant regardless of recon volume. We have all seen this scenario before: It was a heavy sales weekend. The used car manager bought a ton of auction inventory. The first words out of the fixed department manager's mouth were, " Well, we could get all of these vehicles reconditioned in four days if you would quit buying 30 at once. If you would just buy six vehicles a day, that would be great. " Inventory availability is thin. The buying cadence has internal service work bottlenecked one day and empty the next. 36 The fact is, this is the car business. Buying vehicles at an even cadence is not a reality we will see anytime soon. So, as in the past scenario, the service manager panicked and pulled line technicians to do service vehicles in 48 hours. Flat-rate-dedicated technicians hired to handle pre-owned inventory flagged 22 hours and were out of work by Tuesday afternoon. Then the problem was further exacerbated by throwing these vehicles