False, a computer never controlled any labor, only tracks the hours, if reported. And it can put pressure on labor, yes and sometimes needed, depending on how you manage your operation.
How do you track you labor? A few questions to ask yourself about your operation:
1. Do you capture 100% of your labor hours?
a. Payroll hours vs. repair order hours. (You maybe quite surprised.)
2. Do you measure direct vs. indirect hours, do you even track indirect hours of labor?
a. Direct hours are those directly applied to working on a vehicle, piece of equipment…whatever you choose.
b. Indirect labors—most consider this wasted time, but that is not the case. Labor hours applied to duties that are not directly applied to a asset. This could be cleaning the yard, fueling, mowing the grass…fixing the owner’s boat.
3. Compute labor easily? There are manual ways to do this simply without over complicating the system.
4. How do you charge your labor, burden, hourly rate, with/without fringe?
If you do not capture 100% of your labor, charged at whatever you analytically choose, some percentage of your costs are off by that percentage. When you capture the labor hours collecting the data, computer software has the ability to distribute that in different VMRS categories, which will provide the data to manage. Some of those are:
1. Labor costs per vehicle
2. Labor cost by VMRS, brakes, cooling, engine, electrical…and so on.
3. Warranty labor information
4. Just plane labor distribution in any sorted area needed.
