The Vehicle Inspection and Emissions - Testing Process

Frumherj is a car inspection company in Iceland. They are one of the largest in the country, but they want to continue to grow and to outpace their competitors. However, there are some inefficiencies in their process that must be addressed before they can meet their goals. One of their first problems is maintaining an even flow in their process environment. Due to the nature of the inspections and the cold weather in Iceland, they are much more busy in the summer that they are in the winter. This makes it difficult to keep the right amount of employees. There is little they can do to avoid this problem, but rather they should examine their historical data to determine how many employees they will need in order to meet expected customers during peak months.

A second problem is in their arrival and check-in area. The receptionists are doing several jobs and are servicing different types of customers. This causes wait times for inspection customers. One way they can improve this part of the process is to assign one or two of the receptionists to only do inspection customers. She can aid other receptionists when there are no inspection customers, but in order to keep the flow moving someone should be available to inspection customers at all times. This avoids delays further down the process.

Another large problem is that cars are failing their inspections in the early stages for minor errors that could have been corrected before coming to inspection. A way to minimize wasted time and to increase the chances of a successful inspection would be to publish some of the common causes of failed inspections and show the list to the customers who are waiting in the parking lot or in the reception area. By doing this, customers are then able to identify their own problems and get them fixed before ever having to entire the inspection process.

The inspection area also has problems maintaining an even flow because it takes some employees longer than others to conduct their part of the inspection. It is understandable that some parts of the inspection process take longer than others, however, in order, to increase efficiency they need to put their fastest workers on the jobs that take the longest. If the company can make every base take the same amount of time, they will experience less delays as less cars are stopped waiting for the next base to open up.

There is very little correlation between the KPIs and the process map. They KPIs are focused on measurements such as market share, customer satisfaction surveys, and comparisons to competitor's prices. None of the KPIs focus specifically on improving the process so there are no practical, actionable items that the employees can focus on. Without the employees being able to see how they fit in the plan to increase the company's performance, they can't possibly begin to innovate new ways to improve the process. Management by means seeks to find