On the pure co-op side, avoid the whole mess. The bikes that are ready to sell are available. The ones that aren't ready are not. I tell patrons bikes become available depending on volunteer availability. Other than a parts wait, we try to have a volunteer get a whole bike ready, adapting for new volunteers to take on specific tasks they have been taught. We put our repaired bikes in a "For Sale" rack and don't try and keep up with a web list. 

I suggest that only paid staff do paid work. Don't keep more than two weeks work scheduled. Better to lose work than reputation. IMHO.

Ron

On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 10:05 AM, Jonathan Morrison <jonathan.morrison@gmail.com> wrote:

Draw a flowchart of all current steps a bike takes from the time it comes in the door to out the door.  Using a tagging system, record the date and time a bike was (1) put in a queue for each step, (2) date and time when they actually started that step and (3) date and time for when they finished that step.  This will give you the queue times and process times for each step.  The more bikes you track the better your data becomes.  To eliminate the crazy outliers take the mean instead of the average of the process and queue times.

Once you have the data, you are no longer making guesses.

Attack the bottlenecks steps first, they will have the largest queue times.  Either make sure there is no downtime in that step or spread out the work load.  Each time you fix a bottleneck, another one will appear, hopefully not as bad. Again collect new data times to make the right decision.

Another reality is that doing things in big  batches is slower.  The fewer bikes that are introduced into the system at a time the more everyone can focus together to get them out the door faster.

There will always be people that complain that the system is broken, but ironically they don't want to change the way they do things.  Those folks are never fun to deal with.

If you made a step faster, but didn't change the mean time a bike is in your building (in to out the door), whatever you changed didn't make a bit of difference.   The real goal is to reduce the overall time.

All this is old science that for profits and more sophisticated non profits have  already been using.  Some call it the "theory of constraints",  "lean", others "just in time", etc.,...  call it what you like.

On May 8, 2015 6:59 AM, "Laura Biren" <birenlaura@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello all,

Was wondering if any of you had any advice on backlogs and successfully quoting customers when their bike will be done?? We have a combination of repairs/tune-ups, as well as overhauls of bikes people are requesting to purchase from us. So far we have one giant list of bikes that need to get done in order of when people came into the shop and approximately when they desire the bike to be done.

Thanks a bunch!

--
Laura Biren
Outreach Intern at BF Community Bike Project

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