There have been many articles written in the industry about the concept of “lean processing.” Most of those articles explain the ideas behind the “5S” house-cleaning and organization, the shift to a team concept, and the ongoing search for wasted steps, time and energy.

But what do those concepts really mean for a shop moving beyond the theoretical to the practical? What is actually different at shops implementing lean? And perhaps most importantly, what different results are there, if any?

The shops interviewed for this article emphasize that you can't skip understanding the over-arching concepts or any of the other processes involved in “lean” and just implement the things that they are doing. Lean will look different in various types of shops, and it is a ongoing process, not just a few subtle changes that lead to a final “state of lean.”

But too often discussions of lean don't offer enough practical ideas of what implementing it may look like at the shop floor level, and don't always discuss the potential upsides and pitfalls that “going lean” may bring.

For Canadian shop owner Ken Friesen, going lean began with a money-making purge. After a careful review (or a “sort,” according to one of the five S's of lean) of exactly what equipment and tools his business, Concours Collision in Calgary, Alberta, was using regularly, Friesen cleaned house.

“We decommissioned over $100,000 worth of equipment, including a frame rack, that we sold off,” said Friesen. “We had competitors who thought we were going out of business because we were advertising so much equipment for sale.”

Bringing in a little cash at the start was probably good, Friesen said, given the months that followed.

“All that money you're going to pick up (selling unneeded equipment), you're going to lose in initial profitability,” he said. “It was very, very painful in the first eight months.”

Friesen, who has owned the company for more than 27 years, said he almost felt like he did when he first opened the shop, struggling to make decisions without calling the consultant helping him with the restructuring of his business.

“We lost a lot of money in profitability that first eight months,” Friesen said, echoing what many shop owners who are implementing “lean” say. “But from that point on, things started to pick up. Now we've been at it more than three years. I'll tell you my company was doing just over $7 million three-and-a-half years ago. It now does just over $6 million, so probably about $1 million less in sales. But we have made more profit dollars-wise than I've ever made in my entire life.”

Patty McConnell of Old Dominion Collision Repair Center in Eugene, Ore., has gone through a similar process, working the past two 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 said. “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. She said any shop making the change should expect some turn-over. And as with Friesen, McConnell said the first year was brutal on the shop's numbers.

“They all changed and it all looked horrible,” she said. “The first six months I kept going to Dustin saying, ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?' We had higher employee overhead because we hired too many porters/detailers. We didn't have a good gross profit on body labor. Even our supplies and materials expenses were up.”

Now two years in, however, she feels the change is beginning to pay off.

“Our body labor finally looks good again, and our bottom line is finally back looking like how we thought it would look the first year,” she said. “Sales are up. Net profit, of course, isn't where we want it to be, but I don't think it is (at any shop) these days. But are our numbers better than they would have been if we hadn't made the change? Definitely.”

Next week: What does lean “look like” in a shop?

John Yoswick, a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon, who has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988, is also the editor of the weekly CRASH Network (www.CrashNetwork.com). He can be contacted by email at jyoswick@SpiritOne.com.