Coming up today, we talk about how to solve any problem and what dispatchers have in common with a wedge blocking the front door to your house. 

 

Let’s talk about dispatch! 

 

Seriously, you still have dispatch? It’s like somebody who has an ELR of $60. 

 

Like if Gerald Ford Was president, when that ELR was in Vogue, you might need to do some adjustments.

 

Same thing with dispatch. First of all, let’s talk about why dispatch doesn’t work. Because once you’re past like 10 technicians, it’s humanly impossible for one person to keep everybody going. Second of all, I never hear of a dispatch working six days a week. Everybody always talks about that one, amazing dispatcher, like completely forgetting that the terrible dispatcher they have is in the room. 

 

 

You experienced that all the time where you’re like, 

 

“Oh, you know the dispatchers there, we had this one guy, Tom, he was really good. You know, he kept everybody busy and, and it’s like, well Tom’s dead and Pablo here is not going to make it.” 

 

So dispatchers have all this work funneling through one constraint and it becomes a problem and it’s inconsistent.  Why would you have a dispatcher? I’m trying to understand why people still have one today and what does a dispatcher make? 

 

Like on the low end, a dispatcher is making around $50,000 and there’s probably dispatchers making $100,00 because people just don’t know what they’re doing. Dispatchers kind of survived because they’ve been here forever. 

 

I feel like that happens a lot, dispatchers is a position where old technicians can go and retire. When their hands aren’t letting them work on cars anymore and they don’t want to be the foreman anymore. The next step they can take is go to dispatch because they understand how the shop works. 

 

I think this is the theory behind putting them in there and usually what happens is that your high-level technicians make a decent wage. So they put them back in dispatch saying, 

 

“We’ll pay you what you made.” 

 

And that’s how they get to that point because I think normally from what I see, it’s a $50,000 job.

 

So 20 years ago I was getting rid of dispatch everywhere I went, like I would make the dispatcher disappear.

 

Believe it or not. Most of the time dispatchers aren’t that outgoing!

 

Have you ever known a happy dispatcher? 

 

You’re going to pay $50,000 to have a guy be miserable and pile more work on him to make it more miserable. 

 

It’s a constraint, an expensive constraint.

 

For example, it’s like paying me $50,000 to come to your house and I’ll put a little wedge in your door so he can’t open it.  

 

So back to my question. I always sent the dispatcher away, but I’d put him somewhere. I wouldn’t let them go. 

 

Christian asked if I would put them in charge of detail and recon?

 

I don’t even understand why Christian would think that because most of the time dispatchers aren’t handy like that. 

 

 

Additionally, how many dispatchers have you known that are good at quality control?

 

The thing is they can’t have quality control because they can’t leave their little booth.

 

Well let me tell you what I would do with them, I would make them internal Advisors. It worked great and guess what would happen to the hours in the shop? 

 

They would go up and we would sell more to the Service Advisor.

 

The first thing you can do that works better than a dispatcher. It cost 25 bucks and you can save $50,000 when you: 

 

1) Spend $25 on a rack. 

 

Just flat up against the wall and you put them in there in the order they came in and the Technicians come and get them in the order that they came in. This would be organized by however the Service Advisors put them in order. There’s a way already that they’re organized and could be dispatched accordingly. 

 

Like you can do it a bunch of different ways. 

 

You can just do it as is first come first serve. So whenever the Service Advisor puts it in there, you could split the shop in half and have odd numbers and even numbers on one side. If you need two racks it’ll be more effective once you need to have to buy a rack a month.

 

The second things is: 

 

2) Digital dispatch.  

 

You can figure out skill levels and opcodes. Just think about how you could spend a weekend figuring out your opcodes. We got a rack for $25 and we have digital dispatch. It depends on your DMS but it’s hundreds, not thousands to tertiary.

 

Then number three, which really costs you nothing is: 

 

3) Lateral Support. 

 

Which is the best of all three of these options. But all three of these are better than having a dispatcher. I don’t understand. Also what happens when a Service Manager has a dispatcher and the dispatcher isn’t there? 

 

The service manager dispatches. It ends up they’re dispatching half the year because the dispatchers got some rare disease.

 

Everybody pretends like these dispatchers are like some super motivating football coach.

 

So that’s my thoughts if we were in a meeting and everybody still had dispatch.

 

 

 

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