Improving profitability of passenger car service centers

Abstract

The objective of this study is the improvement of the profitability of an automotive service center performing periodical maintenance for medium size passenger cars. The service center that was chosen to be the object of this study faced many problems during the last period (months).The number of sold cars increased which had a high impact on the service center. The demand for periodic maintenance increased especially that done at 40000km. The service center faced a lot of problems due to this increase in demand especially because no extra area can be added to the existing working areas. To achieve the objective of this thesis aset of customers' surveys was carried out to find out the customer expectations and a target was set to achieve the best balance between increasing both customer satisfaction and profit. The improvement service technique was built and based on decreasing the lead time by decreasing the time consumed by the technician to get spare parts as well as decreasing the time consumed in the process of car movement on the car lift. The technique was applied for three cases.