If the idea of yet another explanation of such “lean processes” as “5S,” “constraints” and “blueprinting” has you moving on to the next article, stop for just a moment.

Because beyond the symposiums, consultants, panel discussions and trade press attention focused on lean are some real-world shop operators ready to share their experiences – both good and bad – with trying a new model in their shops.

Aaron Marshall has seen lean make a positive difference at his shops. Marshall, operations manager for Marshall Auto Body in Waukesha, Wis., touts some numbers that have to make even the most jaded give the idea of lean another look. Marshall said thanks to implementation of the Toyota Production System and related philosophies, the shop is now turning annual sales of $3.6 million – $200,000 more than two years ago, with one less production employee and 85 fewer overtime hours a month.

But Marshall and others say making the shift to a new model isn’t always easy or painless. Click on lean production at Marshall Auto Body to see a related article. Ken Friesen of Concours Collision in Calgary, Alberta, another proponent of lean practices, said that unlike Marshall, he saw his company’s bottom line take a beating during the transition.

“We lost a lot of money in profitability that first eight months,” Friesen says, echoing the experience of some other shop owners who found lean paying off, but only after a rough transition.

Rather than yet another explanation of the core tenets of lean, here’s a look at what shops say can make the difference in the success or failure of a shop’s move to a new operating model, along with some practical advice for what those going lean should think about before and during the transition.

Understand the theory, not just the tools. Marshall said he thinks too often shops implement one aspect of lean without grasping or implementing all elements of a true “value-focused” process. They will start, for example, with blueprinting – the complete tear-down of the car to determine (and order) all parts and get all necessary approvals before the car moves into a non-stop production process – which is an element of lean, but just one part.

“Without literally chaining everything together, and pulling all value through the organization from the end where the customer picks up finished work, shops will never attain the cultural change needed,” Marshall says.

In Marshall’s system, for example, each stage in the repair process looks behind it for the next car to work on that’s moving through the process, “pulling” that work through. A monitoring system lets all employees know if any point in the “flow line” won’t be ready to move a car forward every 80 minutes or if there’s a backlog of work at a given stage.

But all those systems aren’t as important as the purpose they serve, he said: looking at what the customer views as valuable, and considering as wasteful any actions that don’t contribute to what the customer values. It’s an understanding and focus on this bigger picture, rather than any of the lean tools consultants often help shops implement, that really indicates whether a shop is lean, Marshall said.

Expect some employee turnover. Patty McConnell of Old Dominion Collision Repair Center in Eugene, Ore., has worked the past three years with her son (and shop general manager) Dustin Caldwell to implement lean concepts at the larger of their two shops.

“We can both say hands-down the biggest challenge and the hardest thing was changing the culture of the shop,” McConnell says. “Technicians are notorious for being independent thinkers and do’ers: ‘This is my car, from beginning to end.’ In this system, it is strictly a team effort. Nobody owns the vehicle. To change that culture has taken us two years.”

That change has come at the loss of some long-term technicians who weren’t willing or able to adapt and left, she said.

The good news in his case, Marshall said, is that the turnover his shop saw was a result of some employees’ weaknesses no longer being masked in a team environment. Previously, four apprentice technicians were working with the shop’s seven journeymen. When placed alone in a prep or reassembly stall in the “flow line” in the shop, where cars move to the next stage every 80 minutes, Marshall found some of those techs couldn’t cut it.

“We discovered overnight that some of them couldn’t put doors together in 80 minutes, or they couldn’t mask a car in 80 minutes,” Marshall says. “Under the old system, everything was hidden. These people weren’t any good, but they were working with someone who really was. The journeyman intuitively knew what he had to do himself and what he could let them do. That system was hiding ineffective employees who came to work late, who didn’t work diligently and in fact had started to rely on the better people to do their work for them.”

Those people also were the ones complaining about the new system, Marshall found, and within months, they had quit and were replaced with technicians who thrive in a setting where they don’t have to be a master of every repair process.

The good news, a number of shop owners said, is the downturn in the economy has more good technicians looking for work than in years past, which may make building a lean team easier now than during periods of full employment.

Be prepared to change your pay plan. Most shop owners implementing lean processes say traditional flat rate or commission pay structures don’t give everyone enough buy-in to the concept of working together to increase the amount of work flowing through the whole process. Switching to more of a team plan can be stressful for everyone, McConnell said. Her shop has had to refine the plan several times over several years to create one that works well at dividing up the pooled pot of produced hours.

Steve Schaefer of the five-location Schaefer Autobody Centers in St. Louis believes lean doesn’t necessarily require the disruption of a pay plan change.

“We have situations running individual flat rate. We have situations running commission as a team,” Shaefer says. “I believe some sort of connection between pay and productivity is always important. I don’t believe those issues are really any different in a lean environment. We’ve worked it both ways. Team pay seems initially like an easy way to get everyone thinking the same way. But then over time, the disconnect between the individual's performance and the measurement of their performance causes problems. So there just has to be some form of feedback.”

But Marshall said he recommends scrapping any complicated system and paying straight hourly. Lean is all about focusing on what is valuable to the customer, he said, and no customer wants to pay for a shop office employee to enter data only because of some “goofy pay plan. That’s a waste,” Marshall says.

His shop had paid hourly with a bonus plan, and instead he built the bonus into a simple hourly rate for employees, keeping his labor costs consistent and not asking employees to take on any new financial risk with the change.

“Let’s not worry about controlling all these costs; let’s worry about getting more done with the costs we already have,” Marshall recommends.

Work for insurer buy-in – but make it work even without it. McConnell acknowledges that some insurers, intent on measuring how quickly an initial estimate is uploaded after a vehicle arrives, don’t see the overall cycle time advantages – and the virtual elimination of supplements – that blueprinting offers.

“But two of our three main DRP programs love it,” she says. “For one of them, it’s just what they wanted, so they were really excited when they found out we were doing this.”

Marshall, too, said that because so few shops have truly implemented the lean process, insurers establish guidelines – such as wanting all cars brought into a shop on Mondays – that may meet their needs in most shops but actually run counter to what would speed the overall flow of work. In the ideal, Marshall said, every day should be similar at the shop, with the same number of vehicles brought in and delivered. Until that happens, he’s found a middle ground, bringing in cars on Mondays and Tuesdays that should be finished before the weekend, and bringing in larger jobs (and blueprinting tow-ins) that would likely extend over a weekend anyway later in the week to help even out the flow of work.

Don’t expect to ever feel finished. The Toyota Production System is not just about setting up a new way to move work through the process, Marshall said. Once he established the six-stage “flow line” line that all cars pass through, Marshall had his employees note how often (and why) they didn’t hit the 80-minute deadline.

“At the end of a three- or four-week period, we’ll look at the overall speed of our value stream to see whether it’s processing six cars a day or more or less, and we’ll look at what areas are the most often not on time,” he says. “The area that has the lowest on-time delivery rate is the only one that needs to be addressed and worked on.”

Focus on that area until it improves, he suggests, and a new area will jump out as the “new” weakest link in the chain, ready to be focused on and improved.

The bottom line, Marshall said, is that just implementing one or two of the “lean” tools is not enough to benefit from the process. The change has to be ongoing, he said, and requires a complete new mind-set.

“You’re totally changing your organization from one that fixes cars to one that fixes the process of fixing cars,” he says.