How to calculate true workshop capacity

 

Throughput and efficiency are paramount for any workshop. But as the business grows (and your teams grow with it), running a tight ship becomes exponentially more complex.

It’s always important to create efficiencies on a small scale: with better equipment, better training, and better processes.

But it’s also important to understand the high-level picture, matching the capacity of your workshop to the workloads you schedule.

It’s a simple calculation, but it involves several steps. Here’s how to calculate your true workshop capacity — so you can maximise the vehicles you service without the need to hire more staff:

 

1.           Gross capacity

This is the starting point for calculating your true workshop capacity: the maximum potential output in an ideal world.

It doesn’t consider inefficiencies or non-productive hours — it’s simply the highest possible capacity given the resources you have.

 

Gross capacity calculation:

Gross capacity	=	No. of technicians	×	Hours in a period
Example:		12 technicians	×	40 hours a week
			=	480 hours a week

With a team of 12 working 40 hours a week, you have 480 working hours available.

If the average vehicle takes 4 hours to service, you have a potential capacity of servicing 120 vehicles a week.

 

2.           Net capacity

Gross capacity accounts only for the potential maximum. Realistically, your teams won’t spend 40 hours a week on productive work.

To get closer to the true capacity calculation for your workshop, we need to account for those non-productive hours. That means accounting for things like:

• Holiday and sickness
• Training and admin
• Meetings and HR activities.

 

Net capacity calculation:

Net capacity	=	Gross capacity	−	Total non-productive time
Example:		480 hours a week	−	60 hours a week
			=	420 hours a week

 

With an average vehicle servicing of 4 hours, you have a net capacity of 105 vehicles per week.

 

3.           Utilisation

After accounting for non-productive hours (due to meetings and admin), we’re still looking at things as they would be in an ideal world.

In reality, your true workshop capacity calculation needs to dig deeper — into the efficiency (or ‘utilisation’) of how your technicians spend their time.

It’s a simple calculation comparing their hours attended with their actual productive hours:

 

Utilisation calculation:

Utilisation	=	(Hours worked	÷	Hours attended)	×	100
Example:		(34 hours a week	÷	40 hours a week)	×	100
					=	85% utilisation

 

If your average worker is scheduled for 40 hours, but they spend 6 hours a week on non-productive tasks (such as waiting for vehicles or delayed services), they would have a utilisation score of 85%.

 

4.           True capacity

This utilisation score is then applied to your net capacity to give you a final workshop capacity calculation:

 

True capacity calculation:

True capacity	=	Net capacity	×	Utilisation
Example:		420 hours	×	85%
			=	357 hours a week

 

Following the same example (where an average service takes 4 hours), your true workshop capacity would be 89 vehicles per week.

 

Why does true capacity matter?

For younger businesses or inexperienced maintenance managers, it’s tempting to plan out your workshop with the basic calculation of gross capacity: the size of your team and the hours they work.

But this basic calculation doesn’t account for the realities of workshop life: the meetings, the admin, and the inefficiencies of teams and processes.

If you plan out your workload around your gross capacity, you’d be expecting to turn around 120 vehicles a week. When in reality, you should be planning your workload around 89 vehicles a week.

That’s a sizeable discrepancy, and one that would lead to delays and missed deadlines across nearly 30 vehicles each week.

So for the most accurate calculation of your workshop capacity, you need to look beyond the basics — to keep your teams on track and your customers happy.