Subscriber Discussion

Do You Track / Bonus Technician Efficiency?

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Aug 09, 2016

I posted about a tech that had a sudden drop in performance and received some great feedback. Figured I would try to push a little more and see if anyone else here is interested in sharing how they do things so we can all get better at doing what we do.

Who here tracks technician efficiency? How do you track it? Whats your average performance? Whats your target? What do you do to increase efficiency? Do you bonus techs for hitting efficiency benchmarks? Do you take it a step further and track effective labor rate?

In my opinion, tech efficiency is the main driver of profitability. Estimate a project at 100 hours, get it done in 90 and you have a more profitable business. Get it done in 110 and you just gave away 10% of your inventory.

To do this, we try to measure all hours. System build time, programming time, install time, dispatch time, QC time, training for the customer, etc. I say try because I haven't figured out yet how to account for some of these hours. When a project is sold at 100 hours, should a helper tech count for 50 of them if he is on the job? I don't know, my gut says yes, but you really cant charge a helper out at $120/hr.

I'll be honest, our efficiency varies wildly. Some months we are killing it and seeing 120+%. Others, we are lucky to hit 60%.

Don't forget to touch on the sales side of things, its not always a slower tech causing poor efficiency, many times not enough hours were sold to begin with.

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #2
Aug 09, 2016

...many times not enough hours were sold to begin with.

Likely "this" if your jobs are wildly up and down in hours from one to the next--and the techs remain the constant.

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U
Undisclosed #3
Aug 09, 2016
IPVMU Certified

Dont forget to touch on the sales side of things, its not always a slower tech causing poor efficiency, many times not enough hours were sold to begin with.

You sound like you're small enough that you would be reviewing any significant deal. Do you know at the time of sale that you didn't sell enough hours?

Or is usually not known until job start? Either way maybe you can revise your internal hourly estimates at that time, to keep your efficiency number normalized.

JH
John Honovich
Aug 09, 2016
IPVM

1, very interesting question / topic, thanks for sharing.

I applaud you for measuring at such levels. I worry about it a little, though.

My main concern is how do you know if the issue is the tech's performance or your estimation? Let's say you estimate 4 hours for programming and it takes 8, it could be that the technician made mistakes or it could be issues with the software that had not been seen before or the setup of the client which was not previously known, etc.

My approach on performance has been more about looking at outliers - which people can excel at particularly difficult core things, and rewarding that. In any job, a lot of the work is straightforward and there does not tend to be great variances in performances but you tend to have a few parts that are very hard, and over time a few techs prove they can handle them while the rest would take days if ever to solve it.

I am with you that it would be great to more fine grain track performance but worry that it is hard to do accurately and also quite time consuming. Finally, my concern would be push back from techs who may rightfully feel that management made mistakes in estimation and did not understand the site specific issues that came up.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Aug 09, 2016

For us, the majority of the screw ups in efficiency can be traced to a starting point in the estimate. absolutely. without doubt.

which leads me to ask, how are others estimating in order to "guarantee" labor efficiency?

I created a labor estimator based on the IPVM labor times and my experience. plug in the answers to some key questions and it gives you a number of hours needed for various categories. Ive only done it for CCTV and for now we are using it along side our normal estimating method (very similar to throwing a dart at a dartboard and seeing where it lands) to see how well it performs.

That said, the techs themselves do mess up their times and make short-sided judgement calls that affect efficiency. We track on a weekly and monthly level, and can easily spot when its a tech issue or a sales issue. The main problem is, we don't have a benchmark for the rest of the industry, so we really don't know if we are underperforming or overperforming.

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U
Undisclosed #4
Aug 09, 2016

I would suggest that you are at the point in your growth history that hiring a quality project manager might be a good thing to think about.

Do what you do best and hire someone who knows how to manage projects better than you do.

Note: this is not a condemnation of your project management skills. I am just reading what you wrote and I think you need to 'fill the gap' that you are expressing you recognize exists... :)

U
Undisclosed #4
Aug 09, 2016

FTR - I am not a project manager and I am not looking for a gig... :)

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Aug 10, 2016

So Im getting that the industry generally doesnt track it, or isnt comfortable sharing the info.

John, the issue of putting techs where they are best suited is really only attainable by tracking how well they do at certain things. Humans are hardly objective, and just because we think that Joey is good at integrating DSC with Exacq doesnt mean he is the best on staff at that. The numbers dont lie. Its the numbers that tell me that my estimating people are screwing up most of the time. Without that, I would be blaming the techs.

Whats the average parts to labor ratio?

Whats the average hours per camera?

Whats the average hours per door?

average hours per project?

Where is your outlier? figuring that out can help quite a bit in determining the outcome of a project.

All of these things are related to each other and will help diagnose an issue and help track the issue down to an area of concern. Again, I dont know what the rest of the industry is doing, so I dont have a benchmark.

Im trying to engineer my company to do what I want it to do for me, my employees, customers and vendors, instead of coming into work everyday wondering where this company is going to take me today.

As for project manager... Definitely need the skills in our toolbox. At what revenue number does a company hire a project manager dedicated to doing that? Id love to have someone responsible for all of it, but is the revenue there? is the margin there? Lots of questions. I know a sales person brings in X revenue, a technician can knock out X hours. What does the project manager do to the big picture and when is the right time to bring that non revenue generating position onboard?

JH
John Honovich
Aug 10, 2016
IPVM

Humans are hardly objective... The numbers dont lie.

But humans create the algorithms, or in your case estimates and measurements. So if those have flaws (which are inevitable), the output will have flaws.

I absolutely applaud your intentions to 'MoneyBall' security integration, I am just skeptical that it will work.

Take your example:

Joey is good at integrating DSC with Exacq doesnt mean he is the best on staff at that.

How do we figure out who is the best at 'integrating DSC with Exacq'? I assume you are going for lowest time. But 'integrating DSC with Exacq' cannot have a clear, single time estimate because different sites / clients / setups will have different complexities involved.

Let's say we have Joey and Johnny and each tech does 3 of these tasks with Joey doing it 20% quicker overall than Johnny. Do we know that Joey is better? How do we determine that Johnny did not have harder site issues (out of date software, more complex integration demands, different versions to deal with)? We still need to 'subjectively' adjust our estimates / weightings to fairly deal with this.

Other concern I am really curious for you to address: Have you had or do you see employees pushing back on such low level performance tracking? And I don't mean poor performers. I mean people genuinely concerned that your time estimates are unfair. Because this type of program inherently creates the problem of the manager saying "Task A takes X" and the tech saying "but the manager did not realize that Task A included conditions B, C, and D which makes X impossible."

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Aug 11, 2016

John, I'll admit I had to look up your money ball reference.

You bring up some good points, and I haven't got it all figured out, hence why I keep reaching out for feedback. You are right that there are too many variables to track with 100% accuracy what or whoo is "better". So does that mean we shouldn't attempt to improve because we can't tell those minutia from the data?

I personally try to resist the urge to use this as a criticism of technicians and to judge them, I was replying to your message above. I try to use this is a big picture measurement of the business and how to improve it. Not so much about who is better, but about how are we doing.

I haven't had any pushback, but I think that is because I've created a structure where everybody benefits if we are winning "the game". Bonus structures are in place for profitability and technicians have a hand in the estimating process, so sales and tech are encouraged to work together to create efficiencies. Not to say it's perfect, and we oftwn get it wrong with what is a relatively young team, but I'm convinced it's better than guessing.

Part of this for us to start to define some of those "task a takes x time, but here are some of the extenuating circumstances that sales needs to look out for when quoting" we just quoted a small project today that included working on a limestone building. Everyone knew it would take longer, but nobody knew how much longer. So we broke it down, talked it through, added what we think is an appropriate amount of time. This threw several other factors out of our normal proportions. (Parts to labor ratio, dollars per camera and effective labor rate are a few) now we know what that looks like when this comes up again. At the same time, I had to have a mount fabricated for a bigger project that I had neglected to note had a wall with no way to mount a camera. Now we know what to do if we run into that circumstance again.

As a side note, we try not to fall into the trap of quicker is always better. We also track warranty expense on jobs over the life of the customer, even if I don't get to look at it very closely or as oftend as I'd like.

JH
John Honovich
Aug 11, 2016
IPVM

Good feedback. I do think it's worth tracking metrics. I am just emphasizing that I don't think you'll ever get to the point where you'll be able to (or should) eliminate the 'subjective' element of management / evaluation.

Maybe the bigger / more important thing that you are doing is building out that repository of knowledge / information (like the limestone building example) that will make the whole organization more effective.

U
Undisclosed #4
Aug 11, 2016

UD1I - I can feel the frustration in your words... :)

Like you appear to - I love the elegance of math. In school, though I liked Literature and History and all the other stuff we were told was important - I loved math.

Why? Because math has no ambiguities.... something either is or it isn't.

If you know the right equations to apply, you can work out the answer. And KNOW it's the answer - no question.

Unfortunately, life is rarely so elegant... and everything can not be boiled down to an equation (...dammit) :)

I think John is on the right track here.... efficiencies are great - but the 'human factor' will always play a significant role in the adoption of any new policies designed to create those efficiencies.

Quality project managers are adept at managing the people involved in any project. I would maintain that it's one of the integral skills for the position.

In your mention of my suggestion to maybe think about looking in to getting yourself a project manager, you went straight to equations to justify the spend. :)

If I was a quality project manager I would be begging to work for a company like yours. As I mentioned before, I think this is just the normal path of any growing service business... as you get larger based on your quality work history, the way you did things before just don't scale well....

I think any good project manager could take a look at what you currently do, devise a plan that makes sense to you, and show how his/her skills at managing projects will save you money in the long run (i.e. his skills will pay for themselves by his/her abilities to efficiently manage the people and projects that they oversee.

MM
Michael Miller
Aug 11, 2016

I feel like I was in your same shoes 2 years ago and since then have more than doubled in size. Since then I have hired operations director and started to implement Connectwise as our backend platform to manage everything. It hasn't been easy and is taking longer than I would like but it's hard to do when you grow this fast.

This new platform requires everyone to enter time for everything they do which allows us to track and monitor our billable vs non-billable time. Techs can enter time from their laptops or smart phones. Our plan is to use this as a way to monitor our technician's efficiency and to make sure we are quoting our jobs properly. Keep in mind this platform manages everything from leads, quotes, time cards, customers assists, service tickets, projects, procurement, RMAs and everything else you can think of.

One thing I will say is this does cost a lot of time and money to implement but in the long run this will huge advantage for us.

GN
Greg Nuckles
Oct 25, 2016
IPVMU Certified

UD1 and Michael - many days I feel the frustration of needing to know our business better to improve efficiency and look to IPVM for best demonstrated practices. We looked at Connectwise, but ended up with Autotask based on a local recommendation. The amount of time to implement the system has been much greater than expected and getting everyone on board has been difficult. How would you classify the non-billable time? (As drive time, planning, paperwork, internal meetings, waste, etc?) Would you recommend Connectwise? I didn't know about SD-Tools at the time, but would like to know if their solution is truly designed for our industry versus a managed service provider company.

MM
Michael Miller
Oct 25, 2016

Greg yes we are 6+ months into our CW implementation and it is going to take another 12 months to get this where we want it. Then we will be tweaking it forever. Complicating things is the fact that we are so busy it's hard to dedicate 8 hours a day working just on CW. So far I would recommend CW but caution people that this takes a lot of time to implement which I am sure any solution like this takes.

Tracking wise we are keeping things very high level right now as we are feeling out how everything works as we implement.

I did find this software that is dedicated to security and fire contracts but they don't have much of a US based presence so we went with CW. simPRO

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Oct 25, 2016

We use different software, but same experience, LOOOOONG onboarding time. The pain would be massive for us to move to something else at this point, but it may well become necessary to properly do what we want to do.

We struggle with time classification, but for project efficiency we do include dispatch and drive time. For service, we make sure the labor rate is high enough to compensate for the required unbillable time. Then track and remember that this industry doesnt seem to have benchmarks, so just make sure you are always improving against your own metric. The important thing is that you are better tomorrow than you were today.

At one point I was screaming at my tech manager because of terrible productivity, then I realized I had 3 technicians in the office for two days working on our systems. So we started creating service orders for everything, including meetings and work they do in our office and warehouse and track it as well.

U
Undisclosed #4
Oct 25, 2016

Does screaming at your employees help to improve their motivation/productivity?

In my experience, it doesn't.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Oct 25, 2016

Absolutely not. And I meant the descriptive screaming, not the literal. I often use the phrase "give them shit" but I do not expect anyone to think that we go around handing people physical pyles of excrement.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Aug 13, 2016

Let's explore...

Anyone want to chime in on what a good to great project manager should earn in our industry? Let's call the market one of the 15 largest cities in the country with one of the lowest cost of living in that group of cities.

U
Undisclosed #3
Aug 13, 2016
IPVMU Certified

Let's call the market one of the 15 largest cities in the country with one of the lowest cost of living in that group of cities.

Columnapolis?

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