Last updated: October 23, 2026
Quick answer: Most fixed ops bottlenecks are cars sitting still, waiting on something. The wait for a customer's yes is usually the easiest one to cut. By phone, estimate approvals take 22 to 23 hours. Across 871 dealerships, estimates sent by text had a median approval time of 6 minutes. Start there. Dispatch and parts come next.
A car stops moving for a handful of reasons, and they tend to pile on top of each other. Here are the ones we see most often.
Why does it matter so much? Fixed ops is where most dealers make their money. One Mercer Capital analysis found fixed ops brings in 50.5% of dealership profit on just 12.4% of sales.1 A bay that sits idle for a day costs more than it looks. More on the economics in our fixed ops guide.
Watch the cars for a week before you buy anything. Pick 10 ROs a day and write down how long each one spends at each step, from write-up to pickup.
The step with the most dead time is your bottleneck. Fix that one first. Speeding up any other step only makes the line in front of it longer.
Then put numbers on it. These are worth tracking every week:
Your DMS already has most of this. Your phone system has the rest.
Once you know where cars wait, the fixes fall into five areas: workflow, staffing, parts, tools and customer communication. The next sections take them in the order they usually pay off.
Send the estimate by text, with a short video of the problem, and let the customer approve it line by line. For most shops, it's the biggest single lever.
In our Cost of Silence report, which covers 871 dealerships and 16.8 million repair orders, the median digital estimate was approved in 6 minutes. 88.2% were approved within an hour. By phone, approvals take 22 to 23 hours.3
Think about what that day means on the floor. The car holds a lift overnight. The tech switches to another job and sets up twice. The customer doesn't get the car back when you promised.
Video does a lot of the convincing. 64% of service customers want a photo or video with their inspection, but only 26% of mass-market customers get one.5 A 30-second clip of a worn brake pad answers the question the advisor would otherwise spend 5 minutes explaining. Our video MPI guide walks through the workflow.
Line-by-line approval matters too. The customer can say yes to the brakes and no to the wipers. A partial yes still moves the car, and the declined line becomes a follow-up. Here's how to follow up on declined service.
Does faster approval also mean bigger tickets? Some of it, probably. ROs with a digital conversation averaged $455.08 in customer pay, against $291.12 without one.3 That's a correlation, not proof. Bigger jobs naturally generate more conversation. See how digital estimates work.
Give them cars that are ready to be worked on. That means parts on the shelf and the approval already in before the car reaches the bay.
Match each RO to the tech best suited for it. If you have one EV-certified tech, keep the EVs going to that bay. Our guide on preparing your service department for EVs covers training and equipment.
Every afternoon, someone checks the next day's appointments against parts. If a part isn't in, call or text the customer and move the appointment before the car shows up. A rescheduled appointment costs you a text. A car that arrives and waits costs you a bay.
A lot of parts waiting is really a communication problem. When techs, advisors and the parts counter talk in the same thread as the RO, nobody walks across the shop to ask if a part came in. With Kimoby, those internal notes sit next to the customer conversation, and the customer doesn't see them.
With turnover at 30 to 40% a year, retention is a throughput problem. Pay plans are a big part of it. Our guide to flat-rate pay for mechanics covers the tradeoffs. A clear path from lube tech to master tech helps too, and so does a relationship with your local trade school.
Move the routine questions off the counter and onto the customer's phone. Most of what your advisors repeat 20 times a day can go out as a text.
Count your missed calls first. Many of them are status calls ("Is my car ready?"). An automatic text update answers that question before it's asked, and your advisor stays at the desk.
Confirmation calls eat hours. Honda & Toyota of Seattle saves 160 hours a month on appointment confirmations by sending them as texts. Fewer no-shows also means fewer gaps in the schedule. Here's more on cutting service no-shows.
The 5 PM line is a payment problem. Only 4.7% of repair orders get a digital payment request today.3 At Honda & Toyota of Seattle, 75% of customers pay by phone before they pick up. When the bill is already paid, pickup takes a minute. More on mobile payments.
We make Kimoby, so read this with that in mind.
With Kimoby, your advisors handle the waiting parts of the visit from one screen. Video inspections, estimates approved by text, status updates, internal notes with techs and parts, and payment all live in the same thread as the RO. It reads your repair orders from the DMS you already use, including CDK, Reynolds & Reynolds, PBS and Tekion. More than 1,000 dealerships across North America have used it. See the Service Lane OS for the full picture.
What it won't fix: it can't hire techs for you or get a back-ordered part here any faster. There's no native online scheduler. It's on the roadmap. Kimoby Voice catches missed calls, summarizes them and lets the caller switch to text, but it doesn't book appointments yet. Approved estimate lines don't write back to the RO yet. That's in development. Payment write-back to the RO works on CDK only for now.
If approvals and phone tag are where your cars wait, book a demo. Bring a week of your own numbers and we'll look at them with you.
For most shops, it's waiting for the customer to approve the work. Phone approvals take 22 to 23 hours, while digital estimates sent by text had a median approval time of 6 minutes across 871 dealerships.
Track how long a sample of ROs spends at each step for a week, from write-up to pickup. The step with the most idle time is your bottleneck, so fix that one before anything else.
Fixed coverage, also called fixed absorption, is the share of a dealership's overhead covered by gross profit from service, parts and the body shop. At 100%, fixed ops pays for the whole store's overhead on its own.
It speeds up the approval step. Across 871 dealerships, 88.2% of digital estimates were approved within an hour, against 22 to 23 hours for phone approvals. It doesn't fix parts or staffing delays on its own.
No. It can keep the techs you have on billable work by cutting the time they wait on approvals and parts. Hiring and keeping techs still comes down to pay plans and career paths.
Sources
[1] Mercer Capital, Don't Turn a Blind Eye to Fixed Operations.
[2] Repairer Driven News, Whitepaper: 74% of techs satisfied with career overall, industry sees 30-40% annual turnover (February 27, 2024).
[3] Kimoby, The Cost of Silence: Dealership Service Report (August 2026). 871 dealerships, 16.8 million repair orders, 12 months ending February 2026. Revenue figures are observed correlations, not controlled experiments.
[4] Marchex, as cited in The Cost of Silence.
[5] J.D. Power, 2026, as cited in The Cost of Silence.