In an emergency room at the hospital, every second can count on making sure patient care is at the highest level possible.
“The surgeon doesn’t roll in his own patient,” said Jordan Schoolmeester, an MRAA Dealer Week Conference and Expo educator. “He doesn’t administer the anesthetics. He doesn’t stage the scalpels forceps or gauze …”
Even when the emergency room is overrun with patients, you still see the nurses everywhere and the surgeons aren’t seen because they are focused on surgery. Somewhere in that chaos, a head nurse is directing, prioritizing what is most important, confirming the top-level patient care, ensuring that the surgeons remain in surgery and keeping things operating smoothly throughout the emergency room.
Service departments, our emergency rooms, are about to be overrun during peak season. Our yard managers are the head nurse in our business. They need to ensure that during peak season we keep our highly trained technicians, our surgeons, doing their jobs, so we can keep our customers and their boats on the water.
The yard manager maintains the balance of operations between service, sales, safety, customer care and facilities. Heading into busy season, we need to revisit the processes and role for the yard manager to raise efficiency and proficiency, lower repair event cycle times (RECT) and improve customer satisfaction throughout the dealership.
Practically everything from collaborating with sales and service departments to facility maintenance, equipment maintenance, boat handling and transportation are the responsibility of the yard personnel.
Common Questions for Yard Managers
- Is the next boat for repair ready to go in the shop or is it buried behind other boats?
- Does the sales manager need a boat launched and in the water for a demo?
- Is there space to park a boat being dropped off for service?
- Is that new outboard set to be rigged on a pontoon accessible for the forklift or is it stuck under another engine?
- The customer is here to pick up his boat, does anyone know where it is?
These are only a few sample questions your manager needs to be able to answer with only a moment’s notice.
Yard Manger = Head Nurse
Every head nurse has a clipboard and checklists to make sure that patients are taken care of, surgeons can remain in surgery and the entire emergency room is working well. So, too, every yard manager should have their checklists for daily and overall tasks. To help you check your procedures and your yard manager’s role, use these checklists as you prepare your dealership for the approaching peak season.
We recognize that every situation is different, so we’ve created these checklists as Word documents to allow your team to adapt and customize the checklists based on your dealership’s specific needs and operations.
Download Yard Manager Daily Checklist
Download Yard Manager Planning Checklist
Have a question? Reach out to Bernie DeGraw, MRAA Senior Education Developer.