Back when I first began my journey in the automotive industry, I was told by my coach that every shop has a ceiling for maximum capacity. He said that the following formula would determine your potential ceiling for labor: Multiply your number of bays by your hours in a week; then, multiply by your hourly rate; next, multiply by 52 weeks; finally, multiply by 2, since for every $1 of labor you get, you should make $1 on parts.

Example:

7 bays x 50 hours (M-F, 7:30am to 5:30pm) = 350 x $130 (hourly rate) = $45,500 x 52 (weeks in a year) = $2,366,000 x 2 ($1 labor /$1 part) = $4,732,000 (ceiling).

This is if your shop was 100% productive all the time. He added that most shops only run at 20%- 40% of that, meaning that shop bays sit not making money 60%-80% of the time.

I couldn’t believe it.

That set me off on a journey to build a way to calculate this in real-time and find the truth. At first, I researched RFID (radio-frequency identification) and short-range frequency devices. I scoured different IoT conventions looking at all the world had to offer, then finally found camera technology with object recognition that could do the job. THAT SIMPLE? No, not hardly. It took years of designing, implementing, throwing away, and starting over. Eventually, my team did it! We worked through MANY issues but finally had a true solution that could measure bay productivity in real-time. Baywatcher.io was born.

The remarkable thing about all of it is that my coach was right: my shops’ bays run at around 30%-40% productivity. On the exciting side of things, we now have information in real-time at our fingertips that we’ve never had before, and it’s only going to get better from here.

Now, the challenge is getting everyone to see how much more productive and efficient we all can be!