by Robin Taylor, TDC
It just comes down to teamwork and everyone doing their part every day.
What does Fit & Tight really mean, you might ask? Fit means your department is in good health and has good quality.
Tight? Well, a tight department is a department under careful control, watching the services and supplies compared to demand.
There are processes that a department must follow to accomplish being and staying Fit & Tight.
Some key objectives for Service Admins to accomplish are:
- Enter payroll daily. With the exceptions of the Tuesday afternoon posting and Salary weeks where payroll is closed until Thursday morning. Be ready to enter Tuesday and Wed. on Thursday morning. Par t of the Certified Tech program is for techs to turn in their time-card daily!
- Enter payables daily. You cannot invoice without having all costs associated with the work order costed. Not entering payables daily will begin a backlog and it is hard to get caught up, so even if you have only 2 or 3 to process-do it! Run your open purchase orders on closed work orders/jobs report and EDI invoice menu to check yourself!
- Post work orders daily. Run your billing expedite report daily. If a work order appears on that report-you need to make sure if you have it and are getting it ready to bill. If you do not have a work order listed-and it shows more than 1 day out, contact the dispatcher and/or technician to make sure it is turned into you asap.
If you enter payroll daily, enter payables daily and enter billing daily-you should be able to post work orders each night. Do not wait until you have a stack of payroll, or payables or work orders to bill-be proactive and do it daily. There are also processes that a Dispatcher should follow to accomplish being Fit & Tight.
Some key objectives for Service Dispatchers are:
- Utilize your schedule dates. Schedule dates in GUI are a great way to sort what work orders are late-and you need to touch TODAY. It is also a useful tool to see when parts are due in, when quote follow ups should happen, and of course, what is scheduled for today/tomorrow. If utilized as it was designed, you should be able to forecast your workload!
- Monitor and complete your scheduled maintenance. Maintenances are monthly, quarterly, bi monthly, semi annually or annually-and they should be completed when scheduled. A customer is looking for an invoice when service is scheduled and due. We do not want to affect their monthly budgets by sending 2 invoices in the same month when services should have been performed separately. Just not good customer service. Most contract maintenance work orders are mixed between service calls. If monitored and scheduled out, you can watch the weeks as scheduled and make sure they all are completed by the end of week 4.
These are just a few key objectives to help you begin, most importantly, it takes teamwork!
Remember, no matter how few purchase order to process, or work orders to post, or contract maintenances to complete, do all these things DAILY so you can be FSG Tight & Tight!