Service Hours Defined

Understanding Service statistics is essential if you want to maximize your service department profitability. The building blocks required to understand KPI’s such as Productivity and Efficiency are the Service Hours, yet these continue to be a source of confusion. Here are the fundamental definitions and rules:

• Available Hours – The total number of hours a technician is at work. So, if a technician is in the workshop from 9am to 5pm and they take 1 hour for lunch, then they are available to work for 8 hours. Available Hours are sometimes called Attended hours.
• Actual Hours – The total number of hours a technician spends working on a PAID job (either customer, warranty or internal). It is IMPOSSIBLE for a technician’s actual hours to be greater than their available hours. Actual Hours are sometimes called Productive Hours.
• Sold Hours – The total number of hours sold to the customer (either customer warranty or internal). For a profitable service department, this number will be great than their Actual hours and maybe even their Available hours – remember selling time is what service departments do. Sold Hours are sometimes called Flat Rate hours, but this really refers to a payment method and as such we prefer the term Sold Hours, after all, that’s what they are.