MarketView

Peak Performance:
Managing Your Carwash During Its Busiest Periods

Peak Performance:
Handling high traffic periods well has always been critical to the success of a carwash, but never more so than today, when a tough economy has made customers more stingy with their time. According to some experts, the best “Peak Management” practices often require business owners to make short term sacrifices for the sake of achieving long-term goals.

Sometimes Father does indeed “know best”, at least when he talks about being busier than ever. According to a 2010 Father’s Day survey by CareerBuilder.com, over six in ten working fathers (63%) now work more than 40 hours a week, and 30% take work home on weekends. Dads aren’t alone in their toils either; 33% of all employed Americans work 50 hours a week or more and 12% put in more than 60 hours a week on the job. So while the number of Americans out of work is historically high, those of us who do have jobs are working harder and longer to help our employers remain competitive in a tough economy.

Economic concerns are also eating into our time away from work as more of us try to stretch the family budget by taking on household chores that we once paid others to do. It’s no accident that some 4,000 restaurants closed their doors in the first six months of last year, since 46% of Americans reported in a Nielsen Survey that they ate more meals at home in 2009.

With more demands made on our time at work and home, Americans have become less patient when purchasing basic goods and services like carwashes. In the June 2009 Check Out Report Survey from Integer Group, an equal number of respondents listed saving time and saving money as the most important factors driving their buying decisions. As the Wall Street Journal noted recently, “growing pressures brought on by the current recession have made (consumers) less tolerant of organizations that waste their time.”

SiteWatch® FastPass wireless acceptance system clears customers without requiring them to even roll down their windows.

Faster Transactions

The desire to save time is driving more consumers to use the Internet as a shopping tool, not just for online purchases, but also to expedite their transactions in the brick and mortar world. Over six out of ten Southwest Airlines passengers (64%) now print their boarding passes on their computers before getting to the airport. SiteWatch® Website Connect™ allows your customers to save time by purchasing your services online.

DRB Systems also offers many other products that help carwash operators win over time-pressured customers with faster and more accurate transactions. For example, the SiteWatch FastPass® wireless acceptance system clears transactions in less than two seconds without even requiring customers to roll down their windows.

Time-Savings Is A Moving Target

However, even though reducing transaction time with products like FastPass is essential to reaching busy customers, providing them with a meaningful time-savings solution often requires something more. These solutions go beyond simply speeding up individual transactions to offer customers real time-savings when they need it most – during your peak periods.

The overall value of saving customers time is not a constant; it decreases during your slow periods and increases when you’re busy. For example, reducing transaction time by two minutes on a weekday afternoon when there are four cars at your tunnel is good, but it’s not nearly as important as doing the same thing when there are fourteen cars lined up on a Saturday morning.

Peak volume periods are the most important time for your carwash to deliver its peak performance. Aside from the fact that busy Saturday mornings may provide you with your only chance to interact with many customers and win their loyalty (that’s why you’re busy!), these periods are also times when the issues caused by any inefficiencies are greatly amplified, turning short waits into frustratingly long ones, and potentially killing relations with customers in the process.

Unfortunately, it’s also most difficult to deliver a peak performance during a peak volume period. Think of the last time you were at an airport during the Thanksgiving travel season or at a quick serve restaurant during the lunch hour rush; how difficult was it for businesses in these situations to provide you with peak service?

It is difficult for businesses during peak times to provide you with peak service.

Peak Management

Making adjustments in your business to meet the demands created during your busiest periods is the subject of Peak Management Theory. Israeli business school professor Boaz Ronen, a leading expert on Peak Management, maintains that all businesses -- from a gift shop in December and a soft drink maker in the summer, to a restaurant during lunch hour and a carwash on Saturday -- need a peak management strategy. The key, says Professor Ronen, is to adopt “different operational tactics (for) peak and off-peak periods.”

Hitting Your Sweet Spot

The extent of the adjustment that a business has to make in its “operational tactics” to handle peak periods efficiently will depend in large measure on how well these periods were planned for when the infrastructure of the business was created.

How much volume should a carwash or any other business be designed to handle? All business owners have had to wrestle with this question. The restaurant that builds its dining area to accommodate 100% of its lunch rush, or the airline that develops a check-in counter large enough to handle the peak season travel rush so well that customers never have to wait, are likely be driven out of business by high overhead. On the other hand, a business that under-builds may do fine when things are slow, but is likely to lose sales because of long lines and poor service that confront customers during peak periods.

The key to success, say Peak Management experts, is to build enough capacity into your business to handle high-volume periods, but not to have so much capacity that you can handle these periods without making adjustments to your operations.

Savvy business owners are able to hit a sweet spot at their sites, keeping infrastructure costs down, but not compromising their ability to process customers efficiently during peak periods. For example, rather than make major expansions to their infrastructure, these business owners will make limited enhancements that focus on areas where bottlenecks are more likely to occur during busy periods.

So instead of expanding the size of their restaurants to handle lunch rushes, quick serve chains like McDonalds will invest in adding a second or third drive-thru lane. Even though these lanes may be idle 80% of the time, they allow restaurants to process more customers and keep lines moving during the 20% of the time when they do 80% of their business. At the same time, the cost of adding the drive-thru lanes is relatively small, compared to the investment required to expand a restaurant itself. You can run multiple Xpress Pay Terminals® self-pay stations off a single SiteWatch System, making it cost efficient to expand your capacity to handle peak periods.

StatWatch® makes it possible to keep an eye on your carwash from anywhere via any Internet connected computer or hand-held device.

Ramp Up Capacity

The adjustments a business makes in its operations give it the capacity to handle peak demands. These adjustments may involve adding extra employees or creating temporary work (or pay) stations that increase capacity during the busy period.

Since peak periods aren’t always predictable, successful businesses will monitor volume to determine when to ramp up. Tesco, one of the world’s leading supermarket chains, has developed a system of automatically increasing the number of cashier stations when customer traffic exceeds pre-established thresholds, which vary depending on the time of day.

StatWatch® makes it easier for you to ramp up capacity by allowing you to see easy-to-read single screen reports on volume, staffing levels and specific employees on the clock at your carwash from any Internet connected computer or hand-held device.

Focus on Your Objectives

Expanding your capacity is one way to respond to peak demands; another is to limit what you offer. Leo’s, a “Coney Island” restaurant chain in Detroit, is famous for an extensive menu that features everything from breakfast to Greek specialties to vegetable stir fry to ravioli and more.

However, when the Detroit Tigers play a home game, the chain’s location adjacent to the Comerica Park baseball stadium limits its menu to less than ten basic items like hot dogs, hamburgers and chili. The limited menu may disappoint some customers who come looking for Greek moussaka or blueberry pancakes, but it allows Leo’s to handle the large pre-game crowds more efficiently, which in the end makes it more popular with its customers.

Carwash operators with Xpress Pay Terminal (XPT®) self-pay stations can employ a similar strategy using XPT Profiles. This feature helps you speed up transactions during peak periods by automatically switching to a shorter, more limited menu screen when traffic volume at the XPT passes a pre-determined level. Later, when the traffic volume drops, the Profiles feature will automatically restore the longer menu.

You've Got To Give To Get

As Leo’s experience illustrates, successful peak period management often means sacrificing smaller immediate goals to achieve more important long-term success. The benefits of selling your full menu of meals, or showing carwash customers your complete menu of services has to be weighed against the greater benefits of taking care of them quickly and efficiently during a busy period when they’re on their way to a baseball game, or in the middle of making their Saturday morning round of errands. Given the fact the current economy has left customers as concerned about saving time as money, this should be an easy choice to make.