Insights

Workshop productivity: how to measure utilisation, efficiency and lost hours

How to measure workshop productivity: formulas for utilisation and efficiency, time recording, causes of lost hours and what the KPIs reveal.

Key findings

Utilisation is time on jobs divided by attendance. Efficiency is time sold divided by time on jobs. Productivity is time sold divided by attendance and, when calculated on the same basis, equals utilisation multiplied by efficiency.
The gap between attendance and time on jobs shows unused capacity. The gap between time on jobs and time sold points to a problem in the course of the repair or in how it is invoiced.
Hours are most often lost through missing parts, rework and unnecessary interruptions. Time recording must therefore capture the reason for every interruption.
Efficiency can exceed 100% when the workshop sells more standard hours than the technician spends on the work. Always assess it together with repeat repairs.
Link attendance, time on jobs and invoicing right down to the labour line item. A summary for the whole workshop will not show where the hours are lost.

Workshop productivity expresses how much sold time is generated from technicians' attendance in the workshop. A full booking diary can mask waiting for parts, repeat repairs and work that never makes it onto the invoice. The service manager therefore needs to separate the use of capacity from the course and invoicing of repairs. Only by combining both views does it become clear whether the workshop needs more jobs, better work preparation or more rigorous job closing.

Which hours is workshop productivity calculated from?

The calculation is based on three time measures. Each answers a different question and needs its own recording.

Measure	What it means	Where to get it
Hours attended	Time the technician is at work and available to the business	Attendance records minus absences and unpaid breaks
Hours on jobs	Technician time assigned to a service job and its line item	Record of work started, interrupted and completed
Hours sold	Labour time invoiced to the customer, warranty, insurer or internally	Invoiced labour line items after credit notes and cancelled items

A standard hour is not an attendance record. It expresses the prescribed or calculated scope of the work. A technician may complete the operation faster or slower, but the time sold corresponds to the scope invoiced.

Planned attendance is calculated as the number of days present multiplied by the daily working hours. For measuring past performance, actual attendance is used. Sickness, holidays or other absences are not unused technician time in the workshop.

Record the preparation of used cars for sale as separate internal jobs. Work for the dealership's own stock consumes capacity just like a customer repair. If only the technician's time remains in the report, without the internally invoiced output, productivity comes out lower than the actual work would justify.

The Time-keeping module in Omnetic records attendance and books the time worked directly to the job and its line items. The service manager can therefore see by job, person and branch whether hours sold match hours worked, without having to combine separate attendance and job reports.

How to calculate utilisation, efficiency and productivity

According to the methodology of ZDK, the German association of motor trades and repairers, the use of attendance is measured as the ratio of productive hours to hours attended. For operational management, the following set of three KPIs has proved its worth. Their names vary from report to report, so always show the formula alongside each KPI.

KPI	Calculation	What it answers
Utilisation	Hours on jobs ÷ hours attended × 100%	How much of the time attended was used on jobs?
Invoicing efficiency	Hours sold ÷ hours on jobs × 100%	How much sold time was generated from time on jobs?
Overall productivity	Hours sold ÷ hours attended × 100%	How much sold time was generated from attendance?

When calculated on the same basis, the following applies:

Productivity in % = utilisation in % × efficiency in % ÷ 100.

Illustrative calculation: where did the hours go?

The inputs are chosen for illustration and relate to a closed set of work with no jobs in progress.

Input	Value
Technicians' attendance	100 h
Time on jobs	80 h
Time sold	88 h

Result:

Utilisation 80% (80 ÷ 100 × 100).
Efficiency 110% (88 ÷ 80 × 100).
Productivity 88% (88 ÷ 100 × 100, or 80 × 110 ÷ 100).

20 h of attendance remained outside jobs. At the same time, the workshop sold 8 h more than the technicians worked on jobs, for example because they completed work charged at standard times more quickly.

The 12 h gap between attendance and time sold is therefore not downtime. It consists of 20 h of unused capacity, partly offset by 8 h sold over and above the time worked. Anyone who tracks only overall productivity cannot tell the two effects apart.

Is efficiency above 100% a good result?

It means that more than one hour is sold for every hour worked on a job. With correct recording, this reflects the technician's experience, suitable equipment and well-prepared work.

The same figure can, however, also result from unrecorded time or from work assigned to a different job. Efficiency should therefore always be accompanied by a report on repeat repairs and rework of the workshop's own mistakes. A quick first repair achieves nothing if the car comes back and the additional work remains uninvoiced.

Where hours are lost: typical causes

German consultancy methodology lists missing parts, rework and unnecessary interruptions among the main causes of declining workshop performance. Each cause requires a different intervention, so time recording must capture it separately.

Reason	What time recording should capture	What management should change
Missing or wrong part	Work interrupted because of materials	Preparation of parts before the repair starts
Waiting for approval of additional work	Time blocked by scope not yet agreed	Passing on findings and responsibility for contacting the customer
Waiting for equipment or support	Unavailable tool, workstation or expert help	Sharing of equipment and allocation of work by skills
Rework (correcting own mistake)	Additional time linked to the original job	Work procedure, training or final inspection
Operational overheads	Meetings, training, equipment maintenance	Scope and organisation of non-productive work
Work not invoiced	Work performed without a corresponding line on the invoice	Job closing and checks before invoicing

An open time record while waiting for a part increases reported utilisation but hides the cause of the loss. The most common loss, a missing part, is reduced by linking the workshop with the parts department: Warehouse in Omnetic reserves parts for open service jobs, and Planner takes their availability in stock into account when proposing an appointment. Detailed rescheduling of a shift and setting stock levels are separate tasks. Measuring productivity should determine which of them the workshop needs to tackle and how many hours the problem is costing it.

How to set up time recording so the figures reflect operations

Time recording must distinguish what the technician was doing, not just which job they were last clocked on to.

1. Agree what counts as attendance

Breaks, training, meetings and equipment maintenance must be treated the same way for all technicians and branches. In the operational report, training belongs in attendance, with its own reason code for non-productive time. If another report excludes it from capacity, this difference must be visible. Non-productive work is not the technician's fault, but management has to allow for it.

2. Assign time to the labour line item

Recording time only against the job as a whole is not enough for a repair that combines routine maintenance, diagnostics and fault rectification. Time on line items shows whether the gap arose while finding the cause, during the repair or at completion.

When two technicians work on a car at the same time, their man-hours are recorded. The time a lift is occupied is a different measure and does not replace the time people have worked.

3. Record the reason for interruptions

Every interruption of work is given a reason from the table of causes. A repeat repair needs a link to the original job so that its time does not get lost among routine work.

4. Close time records before invoicing

A job may contain work performed without a chargeable line item. The opposite mistake is a line item sold without any technician time recorded. Before a job is closed, the scope of the work performed, the time records and the method of invoicing must therefore agree.

A discount on the labour price does not change the number of hours sold. Its impact belongs in the tracking of revenue per hour sold, which is the subject of labour rate calculation. Productivity measured in time and financial revenue are two different perspectives.

What can the KPIs tell you?

Productivity alone does not say which intervention will help. The same figure can result from a lack of work as well as from long repairs.

Combination of results	Likely explanation	First operational step
Low utilisation, good efficiency	The technician copes with the work assigned, but has nothing to work on for part of the time attended	Distinguish a lack of jobs from waiting for jobs to be prepared
High utilisation, low efficiency	Repairs take longer than the time that is sold	Break the gap down into diagnostics, rework and missing chargeable items
Low utilisation and low efficiency	Part of the capacity is lost outside jobs and another part within repairs	Start with the largest time loss and remove its cause
Good time KPIs, weak labour revenue	The problem lies in the price, discounts or the mix of invoicing	Address the effective revenue per hour and the rate calculation

Compare technicians only after breaking results down by type of work. A technician doing repetitive maintenance operations has a different job mix from a diagnostic technician tracking down an intermittent fault. A simple league table based on hours sold rewards easy jobs and penalises whoever helps others with technical problems.

How often should results be reviewed?

The daily report is used to correct records and remove current obstacles. It covers unclosed time records, pending jobs and completed work without invoicing prepared.

The weekly report is used to manage causes. For each reason for loss, it shows the total hours, the responsible role and the action taken. A catch-all "other time" item without a breakdown is not enough.

The monthly report is used to track trends. It contains all three KPIs, a breakdown by type of work, repeat repairs and the status of work in progress. This separates a one-off fluctuation from a recurring problem.

How to avoid month-end distortion

Work carried out at the end of the month is often invoiced only in the following period. The first month then shows a weaker ratio of time sold to attendance and the next month a stronger one.

The calendar report should therefore be supplemented with the time worked on jobs not yet invoiced. To analyse the efficiency of individual repairs, use closed jobs with complete time worked and time sold. Do not merge these two views: the efficiency of closed jobs cannot be multiplied by the utilisation of the whole workshop for a different period, because the relationship between the KPIs holds only on the same basis.

Pitfalls when measuring productivity

Confusing bay occupancy with utilisation. A car can sit on a lift while the technician is working elsewhere or has no work assigned.
Concurrent records for one technician. Their time must not be counted more than once just because they have several jobs open.
Hidden internal work. Preparing cars for sale, warranty work and correcting own mistakes need their own labels, otherwise they distort the workshop summary.
Judging by a single percentage. High efficiency without quality monitoring can hide unrecorded time or subsequent rework.
Rewarding only hours sold. Helping colleagues and complex diagnostics then go unrecognised, even though the business needs them.

The aim is not to get every minute onto a customer job, but to know how time is used and to separate necessary overheads from avoidable losses.

Omnetic links technician time with the job and invoicing

When attendance, work recording and invoicing run in separate systems, someone has to match technicians, jobs and line items regularly, and every data correction carries through to only some of the reports. Omnetic replaces these spreadsheets with a single cloud platform: all modules work with one shared record of the customer, car, jobs and money in DMS Core, so data is not re-keyed between them.

Three modules work together to manage productivity:

Time-keeping records attendance from a mobile phone, tablet, computer or terminal and books the time worked directly to jobs and their line items. The same record produces the basis for payroll and the chargeable time for invoicing.
Workshop manages the service job from the quote through vehicle reception, parts and planning to invoicing. Line items can be split between the customer, warranty and the insurer, so internal, warranty and customer work remain separate in the reports.
Reporting works with the same data as the other modules and can drill down from any figure to the source record. The service manager can therefore trace which jobs and line items make up the result of a technician or branch.

Omnetic can be introduced step by step, starting with a single module. An Omnetic demo walks you through how technician time flows from attendance through job line items to the invoice.

FAQ

How should a technician who spends part of a shift helping colleagues be recorded?

Help with a specific repair is booked to the relevant job and line item, even if the lead technician completes the repair. General technical support not linked to a single repair needs a separate category. Its extent then remains visible and does not distort the time of other work.

How should diagnostics that do not lead to a repair be handled?

Diagnostics is work performed even if the customer does not order the subsequent repair. It should have its own line item and time record. It is invoiced to the extent agreed with the customer on the job.

Does work by an external supplier count towards the productivity of in-house technicians?

No. Work carried out externally has no corresponding attendance by an in-house technician, so its hours and costs are tracked separately. An employee's time on related operations, such as removal and refitting, remains on their job line items.

Can productivity measurement start in a spreadsheet?

It can, provided the spreadsheet links attendance, time worked and invoiced line items through the same technician and job identifiers. However, this means daily data entry, matching and corrections. The greatest risk arises when a job or invoice changes and the change is not carried over into the spreadsheet.