Understanding timelines is crucial to managing service pipelines

RCS Influencer Tracey Donels says that wait times must be monitored when pipelines are full. 

Editor's note: The following is a transcript of a video response sent in by Tracey Donels of Service First Solutions. You can read the transcript below, listen to the response or watch the video.

Tracey Donels: Hello, Tracey Donels here, responding to the question for backlog versus cash flow reality. And as you know, I like to look at everything in the terms of the service department, repair and maintenance. So why or how can a full pipeline strain your finances? So let's think about what a full pipeline means and especially what full means in service.

Too many owners think that a full pipeline in service means lots of service work, but what that means is it's taking longer to possibly take care of that customer. So if we have a pipeline that is over capacity for our service department, the customers are eventually gonna go away. They're going to find somebody else. You can imagine a Chick-fil-A drive-thru. If they have too much pipeline, too many people waiting for work, that's when they need to add another drive-thru line so they can process the customers faster because they have too much pipeline. They can't get the customers taken care of fast enough and then they lose customers. That's when, in the service department, we have to know to add a truck and increase capacity so we can lower the return on our service, or lower the time commit on our return on services. If we have, let's say it's not even emergency work, some people say, "Well we just have a bunch of work that can be done at any time scope work."

In that case, you have a lot of planning going on. And if I have four months worth of future work that's being planned by a department that can just keep up with the work we're doing day to day, then we have no capacity to plan the future, which means those jobs may fail or today's jobs may fail because we have to take our eye off of it. So that's how I feel about over capacity or a full pipeline in repair and maintenance. You have to know that special happy medium on your weekly scorecard, you have to know, hey, this is how much pipeline I have or how much I want. This is the minimum, this is the maximum, and going over either one causes a problem.