Automotive News - February 4, 2008 - (Page 78) 78 • FEBRUARY 4, 2008 Attention 20 Group Members! This is your Give us 30 se VE YOU SA next big idea WE’LL for 2008! $ conds and INSIGHT Southeast Toyota adds space for training Lindsay Chappell lchappell@crain.com 30,000! Visit us at NADA Booth #1429W www.thirdlot.com funny thing happened when the redesigned Toyota Tundra showed up last year in the technical classrooms at Southeast Toyota Distributors Inc.: The fullsized pickup didn’t fit any more. “It fit,” clarifies Dave Majcher, director of the Jacksonville, Fla., tech center. “But there wasn’t enough room in the service bays for our students to gather around it for instruction.” Thus began the latest phase in Southeast Toyota’s growth, not just as a wholesaler of cars and trucks but A also as a dealership service training provider. Last November, the distributor opened a $6.6 million training center in Jacksonville. It’s the third such facility since 1968, when Toyota signed up the late Jim Moran as its independent distributor for Florida, Georgia, Alabama and North and South Carolina. Each training center is bigger and more expensive than the one before. The new center has 33,000 square feet, compared with 8,800 square feet in the building it replaced. Oversized classrooms have heavy-duty equipment that hoists vehicles and engines for inspection by service technicians. Bigger staff To staff the larger center, Majcher’s corps of instructors has increased by about a third, to 19. The operation used to deliver about 27,000 hours of training a year; now it will deliver 80,000 hours. Southeast Toyota didn’t build the center solely to accommodate the enlarged Tundra. But the bigger pickup illustrates the challenge that Southeast Toyota and Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. have faced in garnering a 13.4 percent share of the U.S. market for Toyota Division. With more sales, more vehicles and more technology comes greater obligation and expense to service vehicles. About 2,500 service technicians work in Southeast Toyota’s five-state territory, where the company moves about 415,000 new vehicles a year. In any year, 900 to 1,000 of those employees will pass through the Jacksonville classrooms for technical updates or in-depth training. They stay as little as a day or as long as a week. Service training specialist Chris Ingram, left, demonstrates laser alignment equipment to technicians Richard De Sousa, center, and Chris Whittaker at the new Southeast Toyota Distributors training center in Jacksonville, Fla. To keep up with Toyota’s requirements, Southeast Toyota is asking its dealers to increase annually the certification credentials of their service employees. The amount of added certification is determined by the volume of new-vehicle sales and growth in the number of vehicles in operation. seat in any classroom,” he says. Just in case Southeast Toyota recognized that Toyota’s U.S. growth projections would require more capacity at the training center, sooner rather than later. The distributor built excess capacity onto the rear of the new building. Two complete classrooms and eight additional instructional bays stand ready, minus furniture and finished walls. Hybrid technology training will be critical for the next few years, Majcher says. Toyota is pushing hybrid technology in a growing number of its models. But Toyota policy prevents technicians from servicing hybrid power systems until they have been fully certified in electrical work. Even then, technicians must have four to five years of experience. “You can do other services on the hybrid vehicle, like brake repair,” Majcher says. “But you don’t touch the hybrid system until you know what you’re doing.” Toyota’s overall number of vehicles in service is rising in the United States. That means greater demand for Toyota technicians. That projection is in line with the rest of the industry. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that the number of auto service technician jobs will increase nationally by 14 percent by 2016. You’re up Keeping up that pace isn’t easy, says Joel Hall, who runs the service department at Toyota Mall of Georgia in suburban Atlanta. Hall oversees 27 technicians. “Toyota used to ask us to improve our certification levels by about 10 percent a year,” Hall told Automotive News. “That was kind of vague, and we could always make that work. It usually meant sending one or two guys down to Florida for a class. Now, Hall says, Toyota seeks technicians’ certification at multiple levels in specific areas: chassis, electrical, drivetrain and engine. “It’s all good,” Hall says. “It’s the right thing to do. But getting it done is tough.” Pulling technicians out of the shop for training means lost revenue for the dealership. To minimize disruption, Southeast Toyota itself tracks every technician in its dealership region. Representatives from Majcher’s technical center notify dealerships when a technician is due for the next level of certification. The dealer pays for transportation and lodging. Southeast Toyota pays for the training, course materials and hosting technicians at the center. More candidates Southeast Toyota is thinking of taking on additional training work by bringing dealership service writers to Jacksonville for classes. Empowering service writers to diagnose and correct customer problems could improve dealer satisfaction ratings, executives say. Some problems don’t require a car or truck to sit in the service shop, Majcher says. Tire pressure monitor indicators erroneously light up all the time, he notes, causing customers to bring their vehicles in for service. Ideally, Majcher says, a service writer could investigate, assure the customer that the indicator light was only the result of the morning’s chilly temperatures, and send the customer on his way. Joel Hall likes that idea, even if it means sending more of his service employees out of town for training. “I agree with the idea a lot more than I used to,” he says. “More training in general is a good idea.” c Little rooms Until the mid-1980s, Southeast Toyota would train technicians at Moran’s vehicle processing center at the Jacksonville port. In a couple of small stalls near the relentless flow of imported Toyota cars coming off boats, instructors would go over product changes and new models. By 1986, the distributor had outgrown its training space. That year, Southeast Toyota built a dedicated training center to handle the needs of more than 100 dealerships. That schoolhouse sufficed, more or less, for two decades. But service manager Hall says: “We complained for years that the old building was too crowded.” Even now, Majcher says, the new center — with more than three times the floor space of the old one — is near capacity. “We rarely have an empty http://www.thirdlot.com http://www.thirdlot.com http://autonews.com http://www.unitedcarcare.com http://www.unitedcarcare.com http://www.probac.com http://www.probac.com
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