One of my summer jobs was grinding the excess rubber off cast wheels that the tire had been vulcanized on. The plant manager (and I still like and respect the guy) made the machine and engineered the production rate on it. I generally work pretty fast and efficient, but try as I might, I could not ever get higher than about 70% of what he thought should be produced. Then later on in another plant, we easily made 110-120% production. Of course I have also studied time studies and they are often not realistic for a variety of reasons. I could spend all day replacing a couple struts, not including the time to go get a new set of spring compressors. Some of these people coming up with the rates need to actually do the work for a while and maybe after 2:00 in the afternoon. Just in my humble opinion.
FYIāSomething Iāve not seen in this thread: All flat rate manuals have 3 categories of mechanics, which only makes sense: Expert, Intermediate and Beginner (specific names might vary). Roughly, a job that takes an expert an hour would take an intermediate an hour-and-a-half, and a beginner, two hours. Their shop is usually filled with expert mechanics, but they look under āBeginnerā to calculate the estimated time. Result? You end up paying for twice the time the job actually took. You might as well take their advertised labor rate and double it. Iāve found this happening everywhere the flat rate manual is used. Iām sure there are those who donāt abuse the system like this, but Iāve not yet encountered one.
Donāt know what kind of manual youāre looking at . . .
There are warranty labor times, normal labor times (for an out-of-warranty repair at your typical independent shop) and extreme labor times (hardware seized in place, every single bolt has to be torched off, for example)
And the labor times also vary, depending on if you use chilton, motor, oem, or what have you
This would be news to me. Iāve never seen a flat manual with varying stages of expertise on getting the job done. None of the manuals I have or ever seen (customer pay or warranty) are worded like that.
Care to provide an example?