Category: Blog – All HHP Blog Articles

At Highway & Heavy Parts, we believe that knowledge is the key to making good decisions for your business. Because of this, we strive to continually provide our diesel repair shop customers and industry associates with useful, educational information that may help them improve their business. Please take a moment to download and read this white paper. We hope you find it useful. Because we value your opinion, we also welcome any comments you may have regarding this white paper, or any suggestions you may have on future topics we can cover about our industry.

Systems are the foundation of any diesel repair shop business. But, how do you know if your systems are working? How do you evaluate them to determine if they are effective or not? Too many repair shop owners don’t know the answer to these questions. They are running their businesses with systems that produce a result, but there is substantial waste and inefficiency in those systems, because they don’t evaluate their effectiveness by measuring the results.

As we briefly mentioned in Part II of this blog series “The Importance of Systemizing Your Diesel Repair Shop – Part II”, system inputs, outputs, and costs comprise the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that need to be identified, analyzed and measured in order to determine the effectiveness of the systems that run your diesel repair shop.

As the owner or manager of a diesel repair shop, do you continually struggle with getting the optimal efficiency out of your work flow? Do the same problems and errors keep reoccurring? Has your revenue flat-lined? Is your business not growing like you expected?

The rate of new technicians coming into the industry is lower than the rate of technicians retiring. For many repair shops and fleets, this shortage is already a harsh reality.

It’s difficult to find skilled employees. Then once you’ve interviewed and hired them, it’s a challenge to keep them. And even if you’re able to keep them, maybe some aren’t producing the way you want. You should determine why this is happening. It could be any of a number of reasons such as they don’t have the right tools, job responsibilities or work hours changed, they don’t get along with a direct supervisor or co-worker, feel there’s no opportunity to advance, they’re bored, or maybe they don’t feel valued. You won’t know unless you ask.

Have you taken your diesel engine apart and noticed damage to your piston skirts? You might be wondering what could cause this kind of failure. We’re taking you through possible failure modes to help prevent this damage from occurring on your pistons again.