ACtion Magazine - NAPA - Spring 2016 - (Page 26)

Mission Possible: Preventive Maintenance! By Dave Hobbs, MACS Field Correspondent The technical and business side of repairing vehicles BEFORE they break We regularly cover the most technical aspects of HVAC mechanical and electrical repairs in our monthly service reports to help you tackle today's technology challenges. The benefit of being technically educated is greatly diminished, however, if you are struggling to keep your business growing! Have you ever heard the phrase work smarter, not harder and thought nice idea, but how? Then this MACS Service Report is for you! This month we'll cover some proven techniques to work smarter by focusing on PM (Preventive maintenance). First we'll provide the business aspect of motivating yourself and your customers on the virtues of PM, and then we'll present the nuts and bolts (and software) side of the case for Preventive maintenance to keep yourself and your customer informed on this often overlooked aspect of today's auto repair business. The Preventive maintenance numbers world Source: DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, Inc. & AASA Industry Analysis Preventive maintenance seems so obvious: Pay me a little now to prevent paying me A LOT MORE later on down the road. But the obvious things in life are sometimes the hardest to grip in this overly technical world we live in. PM is so obvious in fact, it's not only overlooked by many customers, it's overlooked by a lot of repair shops! A quick look at statistics reveals that over the last decade, the financial number that is consistent is that there is annually around 60 billion dollars worth of unperformed maintenance in the United States according to MEMA (the Motor & Equipment Manufacturers' Association). See Figure 1. $60,000,000,000. That's a lot of PM not being performed! The number, of course, includes A/C systems that need proper charging, cooling systems that need flushing, brake pads that need replacing, overdue oil changes, tire rotations, and so on. That financial number is mind boggling. 60 Billion is just slightly under the net worth of Bill Gates. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are around 700,000 techs ready to do that work should the vehicle owners opt to have it all done this year. Now let's do the math. In fact, you can even do a very conservative discount of that number and estimate that as much as half of that will never be performed due to a substantial number of vehicle owners who can barely afford to put gas in their rides, much less spend money on PM. That number would also include the vehicle owners who probably could but won't spend money on their vehicles until they break down. If you do the math now, with $60B X 50% ($30B) and divide that into the number of technicians (700K), you get around $43,000 of unperformed maintenance per technician per year. Every shop owner and every technician should be excited with a financial number like that. Figure 1: What percentage of the $60,000,000,000. in unperformed maintenance would you like? 26 ACTION/NAPA * Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ACtion Magazine - NAPA - Spring 2016

ACtion Magazine - NAPA - Spring 2016
Watching yf
A/C Diagnostics and Troubleshooting
Staying visible in times of change
The compressor is not just a component
Restricted air flow
Externally Controlled variable displacement
A new Jeep
Increasing Facebook interactions
Mission possible
R-1234yf and other trends

ACtion Magazine - NAPA - Spring 2016