Hi everyone, I was just put into a pretty good position but it will be a tough one. I'm taking over for a guy that never kept records of services or parts in or out and I was wondering if you guys had pdf's of service sheets for different intervals. Any advice on how to run the shop efficiently and effectively would be appreciated as well. Thanks, Sean
What product are you peddling? Are you trying to sell service and repairs? If you are a dealer service intervals for each piece of equipment are printed in the operations manual. I would start there
It sounds to me like he is running a company shop, what with the Morooka questions and whatnot.
90% of the time, I'm trolling while driving. I really should pay more attention.
I work for a small construction outfit. Lot of 1999-2002 f350's and 450's, takeuchi excavators and skidsteers, and other smaller equipment. I don't have any good templates for that and i'm terrible on the computer.
Along with many other suggestions you might get I would suggest seeing if a local school has a night school course on computers. Maybe one where they teach how to set up and use spreadsheets and databases. Does not have to be real high level stuff like a major corporation would use to track thousands of things just basic stuff. A couple snips out of what I had set up where I worked. The first one was the main opening page where I could enter the current hours off a machine and it would calculate the hours since the first of the year. It would also automatically flip those hours over to the second page and calculate the hours since last service and if those hours were getting close to the predetermined service interval it would show up in text at the upper part. This was just my first attempt at using a spread sheet and I'm sure if I was to set something new up I would do somethings different but it was a learn as you go thing. The company I worked for was one of the biggest aggregate companies in the world but everything was done for the most part on a local level and if you didn't have a computer savvy boss you just did with what you had!
Getting a course or some help on excel would be a HUGE help. Spreadsheets are so helpful and once you get good at building them and entering formulas you’ll use them for all kinds of stuff. Absolutely worth the effort to learn. Plus they’re all but free other than the program cost, which is negligible. You can build one and as your experience grows add to it, import the info into another or whatever. Truly unlimited possibilities.
I'll see what my options are for classes on excel and word docs. Do you guys have pdf's of service sheets where I can fill in filter numbers and quantities too? That'd be a big help in the mean time. Thanks for the suggestions.
I have been using spreadsheets since a green screen Apple II e and they are pretty much the same now as then. Great for figuring out any kind of formula, dates, times, financial information quick and dirty. Learn them and use them, they will make you look like a whiz.
Anything you want to learn is on Youtube, and if you don't like the presenter, then you just click a different one. I'd only take an in person course if that specific course and specific instructor was recommended by somebody who had taken it and who knew you well. It's just not worth your time to chance on the quality of tech schools. There's nothing wrong with paper if you're talking about a dozen pieces of equipment. A three ring binder is a lot handier than a computer in some situations.
One "problem" I found once I got up to speed using the spreadsheets was every fall my boss would hand me a stack of paper with notes on it for me to do up a spreadsheet for the various parts of the quarry's winter work list that he would then turn in to his boss. I did get the feeling that sometimes no one really pays too much attention to what is in those boxes on the spread sheet other than the totals in the last column. See for one front end loader I inserted one line item that was for "Painting and Pin-Stripping". Not one question or remark was ever made bout that one!
I guess I'm old school (born in 1950 lol) but I use pencil and paper for tracking lots of things. Takes less time to write it down than to type it in. Back in early 90's I was managing 125 employees in a county road department. We had 5 garages/ districts and tracked lots of work types and had to prepare a budget every year. Excel spread sheets were just coming into use by us. Finance guy gave me and other department heads draft budgets (mine was the largest and most broke down. So the big boss wanted the maintenance activaties increased by 6 or 7% something like that. I asked the fiance guy to do it for me - it's easy in a excel spreadsheet. He got all pissy with me and insisted in no uncertain terms that it was my job not his. I was a novice with spreadsheets at that time, had never used them. But I googled a bit and discovered his spread sheets didn't have a single formula, every cell was typed in. The rest of the supervisors and the top dog were real impressed by his "spread sheet skills", but I wasn't.
That makes two of us! April here!
I suggest you contact HCSS (Heavy Construction Software Systems) at HCSS.com They have a excellent Repair and Maintenance software system, from work orders to final cost to own and operate.