A vehicle arrives for an 8:00 appointment and does not reach the technician until 8:20. The repair is finished at 3:15, but the car does not make it through wash until 4:00. On paper, the shop may look fully staffed; in practice, nearly an hour of the customer’s day disappeared outside the bay.
When dealerships talk about throughput, the conversation usually goes first to technicians, bays and appointment counts. Those matter, but after nearly 20 years watching vehicles move through dealerships at Citrin, I’ve learned that a meaningful amount of service capacity gets lost in the physical flow around the shop.
Vehicle Movement Is a Workflow
Every repair order has a physical journey:
Arrival → Check-in → Staging → Technician → Completed Repair → Wash → Pickup Staging → Customer
Someone has to move the vehicle between virtually every one of those steps.
Yet dealerships often put significantly more thought into the technical workflow than the physical movement of the car.
I’ve seen technicians waiting for vehicles even though the dealership has plenty of work. I’ve seen advisors leave customers to move cars. I’ve seen completed vehicles sit for an hour before reaching wash.
Those aren’t labor-capacity problems. They’re flow problems.
Five Minutes Becomes Hours
Small delays are easy to dismiss when you look at them one at a time. A porter takes an extra five minutes to locate a car, a technician spends seven minutes looking for keys, or a completed vehicle waits ten minutes before someone moves it. Across 80 or 100 repair orders, those small gaps turn into a meaningful amount of lost productive time.
This is why I think dealerships should pay more attention to the minutes between the major steps of the repair process.
Don’t Let Expensive Employees Absorb the Bottleneck
One of the most common workarounds I’ve seen is an advisor stepping in when the porter operation falls behind. The car gets where it needs to go, so in the moment the problem appears solved, but the dealership just used an advisor’s time to compensate for a vehicle-movement problem.
The same thing happens when technicians search for cars or managers manually reorganize staging areas.
The dealership may never record that time as lost productivity, but operationally that is exactly what it is.
Wash Is Part of Throughput
Wash deserves particular attention because if the repair is complete at 3:15 but the vehicle is not ready for the customer until 4:00, the service process effectively took another 45 minutes. Customers do not care which department created the delay; they simply know their car is not ready.
I’ve seen dealerships dramatically improve technician productivity while continuing to create a logjam at the end of the RO because wash, staging or vehicle retrieval wasn’t designed around the volume flowing out of the shop.
Map the Entire Journey
A simple exercise can reveal a lot: pick several vehicles and follow them from arrival to departure, recording when the vehicle:
- Arrives
- Leaves the service lane
- Reaches the technician
- Leaves the technician
- Enters wash
- Is staged for pickup
- Reaches the customer
Then look at the gaps. You may discover that some of the dealership’s easiest capacity gains are not inside a service bay at all. After years of watching these operations, I’ve come to think about porters differently: a good porter team is not simply moving cars; it is managing the physical flow of inventory through a service-production system, which is a much more important job than the title often suggests.