Shop Management
Measure repair-order cycle time by stage
Kace BurnetteSeptember 1, 20266 min read
Car count is not throughput. A shop can look slammed and still lose the day because repair orders are aging in the wrong stage instead of moving from decision to decision.
The fix is to stop treating repair-order cycle time like one giant number. Break each RO into timestamps: check-in to diagnosis, diagnosis to estimate, estimate to approval, approval to parts-ready, parts-ready to complete, and complete to picked up.
- Cycle time should be measured by actual elapsed time inside each stage.
- The oldest RO in a stage usually matters more than the blended average.
- One healthy queue can hide another queue that is quietly choking the day.
Operator guide
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See the bottleneck inside the workflow.
Crovalt maps repair orders by stage so you can see where time is actually piling up instead of just seeing a big old queue.
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