How to reduce waste and boost productivity in and out of the paint booth

Much of what is written about lean in collision shops focuses on recommended changes in the office and body department. But streamlining those areas only will lead to backlogs if lean thinking isn't done in the paint shop as well.

"If an organization is truly going to be lean, the whole organization has to be lean focused," says Amjad Farah, manager of business development for BASF Automotive Refinish and a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. "There can't be one part that's not."

"You can't lean out just one department – what we call silo thinking – because you'll maximize that department at the cost of everything else in the shop," says Doug Kirk, strategic sales and services support manager for AkzoNobel. "The biggest enemy of lean is silo thinking."

Kirk, Farah and other experts about lean processes within the collision repair industry weighed in about what's different within the paint departments of shops implementing lean-focused problem-solving to improve productivity. Following are some of their key suggestions.

Standardize the processes. Evidence that a shop is thinking lean is a chart on the wall in the paint shop showing exactly what products and ratios are used for its clear coat.

"There's no ambiguity, and it's specific to that shop," Farah says. "Here's how we do it here."

Part of reducing waste is standardizing best practices, clearly defining – even using photos when appropriate – products and processes to be used and what quality standards must be met. This reduces time-wasting conflicts about what grits are used to finish body work or primer, for example.

It also can eliminate the need to stock multiple brands and variations of different products preferred by different employees.

"Choice creates variability," Kirk says. "Variability creates something you can't control. So a process-centric shop reduces that variability down to the optimal amount of inventory."

Get organized. Once you've eliminated unneeded or overlapping products and materials from your paint inventory, put what your techs need at their fingertips, says David Knapp, senior manager of business solutions for PPG Industries. For example, have a paint prepper, keep a list of every tool and product he uses for a week. Then review the list and identify the items he uses daily. Those are the items that should be included on a point-of-use cart, always within easy reach.

Provide information visually. Even in shops where language barriers aren't a problem, providing information to employees in ways other than just writing can help reduce wasteful mistakes and oversights. For example, use symbols and markings on the vehicle to indicate what panels are to be blended, what should be done with pre-existing rock chips on a hood, etc. Another piece of visual mapping that affects the paint shop could be loose parts.

"A body man might remove a bumper cover, mirror or molding that may need to be painted," Knapp says. "Make that part of the mapping process. Write down on the driver's window of the vehicle how many loose parts there are, so the paint department makes sure they're in the booth at the same time."

AkzoNobel created a blending ruler that shows the minimum amount of space from a repaired area that would need to be feathered back and primed, and how much distance from that area would be required to blend the color, Kirk says. It's a visual tool that helps the repair planner and the paint shop (and can be used to explain the process to insurance adjusters).

Don't wait to match. Eighty percent of time wasted in the paint shop involves color matching, says Steve Feltovich, manager of collision business consulting for Sherwin-Williams Automotive Finishes.

"So you start to minimize the waste on color issues by getting ahead of it rather than letting it get ahead of you," he says.

One key is ensuring the paint shop has, and is using, all the color tools available through the paint manufacturer. But just as lean-thinking shops try to eliminate delays in the process through blueprinting – a complete disassembly of the vehicle upfront to identify at the start all needed parts and processes – color matching should start before the vehicle reaches the paint shop.

"Identify color during the preplanning and blueprinting process so it's proved out well before the car arrives in the paint department," Feltovich says.

Kirk concurs.

"That way, if you've got a stock issue with a tint, or you have multiple shades of a color, you've got several days before that vehicle hits the paint shop to fix the problem," he says.

Involve your paint supplier. Another source of potential waste in the paint shop is excess inventory.

"The goal is to have just the products and amount of products on hand you need to have minimums and maximums established and a signal system in place that indicates when you've used something and when it will need to be replenished," Feltovich says. "It's about just-in-time stock and inventory management."

Such a system could be electronic, using a barcode system and computerized inventory, or as simple as a tagging system on paint and materials cabinets in the shop. The system is less important than keeping the goal of having just what you need when you need it in mind.

"When you reduce inventory and overstocking, your people also become more conscious of what they use," Feltovich says. "It changes their behavior. They tend to become more conservative, more conscious of waste and in doing things right the first time because they don't have excess material to throw at their mistakes."

Look for wasteful, non-value-added processes. Waste in the paint department can be as basic as using 2-inch masking tape when 1.5-inch or narrower will do the job.

"You see people still papering the car instead of just using plastic to mask even through the plastic is now sufficient to keep (overspray) paint from flaking off," says Steve Trapp, collision services development manager for DuPont Performance Coatings. "You can just tape the plastic right to the blend area, so masking the car with paper isn't necessary."

Changes in products and processes similarly have eliminated the need for wet sanding. Choosing the right size DA sander can reduce the repair area. Can't fully mask a car because you still need to be able to drive it through the paint shop?

"What if you used magnets to hold down the plastic so you can still drive it into the booth, then quickly pull the magnet off and reposition the plastic and use strip magnets to hold it down," Trapp says. "That's a good, lean-thinking solution."

Remember not all waste is equal. Kirk cautioned some things that may appear to be wasteful – and abhorrent to a lean operation – might not be. While not advocating for overmixing paint, ending up with a bit more than what was needed is significantly less wasteful than having to mix a second time because there wasn't enough for the job.

Similarly, painting panels off the car uses slightly more paint. But the time savings it enables more than makes up for what might seem like a wasteful use of materials. That's why Kirk prefers the term process-centric to lean. While lean focuses on the total elimination of waste, a focus on the entire process results in a more strategic reduction of waste.

Schedule smarter. One key aspect of lean production is flow – developing a steady, level stream of work moving throughout the shop each day. If the goal is to process $200,000 in sales in a 20-working-day month, and the average job is $2,000, the goal for the paint shop is to produce five cars per day. In an eight-hour day, that means a car should be moving into the booth ready to spray every 96 minutes.

"So many shops don't think that through," Trapp says. "Their paint shop ends up with nine cars on Thursday, so the painter stays late, trying to make flow."

One way to achieve consistent flow is to move resources. If the prep team doesn't have a vehicle ready to go for the next booth cycle, someone from detail may be pulled to help out. The key is look at the 96 minutes as a signal not a deadline.

"If you're not achieving that flow, it's your signal to stop and ask why didn't we, and the answer is the next problem you look to solve," Trapp says.

Focus on the whole. Trapp cautions any such idea might not be the right answer to immediately implement within a shop.

"First you have to look at what problems you're having," he says. "If a change doesn't address the particular constraint you're having, it may be a good idea but not what you should be doing first. For a true lean thinker, it's all about solving a problem, not just implementing ideas."

At the same time, the paint company experts agree that the paint department shouldn't be ignored during implementation of lean processes elsewhere in the shop.

"It's as if there were a string that ties every part of the shop together," Farah says. "When one part of that string moves, it all needs to move, or the string is going to break. If an organization is going to be lean, the whole organization has to be lean focused."