How to Organize Your Car Workshop for Optimum Efficiency With Barricades

If you are running an immensely busy garage that deals with a whole host of different vehicle-based services, you may find that there are times when it takes far too long to move jobs around to get to the right one.

This is when it would be a far better idea to spend a weekend organizing your site so that your workers can complete their job lists quickly and move through their work quota with ease.

Designate a Customer Parking Area

When your site is well stocked up with jobs to do, the last thing you want is for your customers (like those who prefer to just drive in rather than ring in) to park amongst your jobs and ‘to-do’ vehicles. So, setting up a few designated parking bays for these customers well away from your working vehicles and those of your employees is a good idea.

If space is tight, you will need to use some form of traffic barricade and prominent signage so that your customers get the right idea. Investing in a few different styles of traffic barricades could help you zone your areas and make those areas easier to see, not only for your customers but also for your workers.

Segregate Employee Parking

Your employees are likely to work long hours, and although they may want to leave your site on their lunch breaks, they will otherwise be parked on site all day. You are not going to want your employees to use the valuable spaces put aside for your customers, nor will you want them parking in a manner that will hinder the day’s workload from getting completed. So, it stands to reason that you should also segregate an area specifically for employee parking.

Again, you can make use of barricades to highlight the areas that are employee-friendly and, therefore, keep these vehicles out of harm’s way and away from the vehicles that will be moving backward and forward around your site.

Organize the Working Areas

You will also need to organize your working area to ensure your workers are doing their best. Of course, this means that they should all have the tools and equipment available to perform their daily duties without having to beg, borrow, or steal from neighboring workers. As you can probably imagine, this can ruin the time frames of not just the one employee who is looking for the right tooling or equipment but also the employee who has suddenly become light on the equipment that they may require.

·       Cordon off working bays

You can help this by ensuring that each of your workers has a well-equipped working bay in which to conduct their daily tasks. Sectioning each bay off with appropriate barriers will help your workers stay organized while also improving the overall safety of your site, especially when moving vehicles in and out of the working areas.

Accidents will no doubt happen from time to time, whether it is in a little knock here or an odd scrape there. These can be due to your workers rushing to get work completed or because they have just misjudged their space or the turning circles they require. Installing highly visible traffic barriers around each work bay will help limit these unfortunate events and save your customers from getting slight damage to their vehicles, which you may have to correct before returning the vehicles to their owners.

·       Create zoned areas

When you have finished creating your working bays, you need to address the area of your yard and the vehicles that are stationed there.

Work waiting to be performed

You likely have a little bit of a backlog in work, which can be due to employee sickness or unforeseen absenteeism or jobs taking far too long to finish due to their exploratory nature. This will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect throughout your site, so it is key that your employees and their workloads stay well organized.

Having an area where every vehicle (or long lines of vehicles) has to move to get the right job out to start work on it is daft, and yet a lot of garages do work in this way. Instead, perhaps having an area where the vehicles that were driven in first can be moved out without readjusting the other stationery vehicles would be a far better situation. Set this up with the use of traffic barricades and you will have order on your site.

Of course, from time to time (probably at the end of the working day – depending on what cars were scheduled for the next day), the other vehicles may all need to move forward along the queue. However, this is a task that can be made far quicker when all your employees are involved (or at least the number required) rather than just one car hopping between jobs.

Work on hold

You will also need to designate a work on hold bay for jobs that are waiting for parts or can’t be returned to the customer in the time frame provided. Having them stored in a working bay could mean that you have an employee unable to complete any other tasks, which is not good for your business.

Instead, you should have a holding bay where this work can sit until it can be finished and paid for by the customer. Of course, if you have difficulties receiving payment from a customer for the work carried out on their behalf, their vehicle should be moved to the holding bay until payment is completed.

Having this area cordoned off from the rest of your working site will enable your employees to see at a glance if something requires chasing up rather than the vehicle sitting dormant and forgotten amongst the vehicles waiting to have work performed.

Work finished and waiting for customer collection or delivery

Of course, if your business is running well, then you will have just as many vehicles going back to their owners as you do coming in. When it comes to customer collections, it tends to be a case of the customer coming in as and when they can rather than booking collection time slots. This means a vehicle could wait a few hours to be collected.

Having a designated collection area will keep your yard tidy; it will also mean that your reception employees will be able to deal with your customers rather than having one of your higher-paid employees, such as your mechanics, having to move away from work to ferry a vehicle around your site because the owner has decided to collect at an inopportune moment.

Last Words

These barricades can ensure there is never any confusion about what each area is for and where cars should and shouldn’t be and provide more safety. Make use of them in your workshop today.