3 Best Ways Body Shops Can Improve Cycle Times

The body shop business is evolving ever year, and yours should, too. Here, we have the 3 best ways body shops can improve cycle times.

• Upgrade Your Paint Booth
• Upgrade Your paint Booth Dryer
• Implement Workflow Management Software

Upgrade Your Paint Booth

If you’ve worked in the body shop business for long enough, you know the bottlenecks that result from your paint booth. In fact, whenever you look online, the number the most consistent bottleneck you see listed is the paint booth. Unfortunately, many body shops have booths that aren’t sealed properly and create over-spray.

Beyond that, once over-spray builds up, it’s a health and safety hazard for your shop and technicians. Over-spray impacts not only impacts your ventilation, but also your finishes. It clogs up exhaust and filtration filters– resulting in dust and debris getting everywhere.

At the end of the day, a poorly maintained paint booth will negatively impact your body shop’s efficiency. Companies, such as Garmat, prioritize creating efficient paint booths. They’re a paint booth manufacturer dedicated to creating safe, high-quality, paint booths that focus on improved cycle time and reduced energy consumption.

Upgrade Your Paint Booth Dryer

A lot of things in the industry have evolved; however, some shops still rely on dated drying methods. Convection dryers are a thing of the past, and catalytic dryers are the new best thing.

When it comes to catalytic dryers, the two variants are gas catalytic and electric infrared. Electric infrared creates a short wavelength through tungsten bulbs in order to dry paint. The total process can take upwards of 100 minutes. However, gas catalytic drying creates an exothermic reaction (no flame whatsoever) with natural gas to create heat at a medium wavelength. It can dry and cure paint in as little as 16 – 30 minutes.

While gas catalytic drying was invented close to 20 years ago over in Italy, and is a staple in European shops, it’s now making its way into the US. Companies, such as Gascat Dryers, provide the machinery, parts, and upgrades all domestically within the US. They work with in-state distributors to provide you everything you need as quickly as possible.

Implement Workflow Management Software

If you run or own a body shop, you know how much of a headache back-office work is. You’ve likely spent hours, if not more, working through invoices, estimations, accounts, or more on a daily basis. It’s not the part of business you enjoy; however, there’s a reason the most successful shops have switched over to workflow management software.

For most body shops, waiting for approvals or estimations causes unnecessary delays. If you’re still using sticky notes or spreadsheets for information, then you’re making your cycle time much longer than it should be. Luckily workflow management software can take hours of paperwork and condense down to just a few minutes.

Management software companies, such as AMT, can keep your shop organized and efficient. It doesn’t rely on drastic changes or expensive purchases and lets you store documents, data, photos, operation statuses, and more all in one place with your desktop or mobile devices.

Gascat Dryers

Gascat Dryers provide you the best, fastest, and most efficient drying solutions out on the market. We believe that time is money. With this advanced drying system, your body shop will reliably process more vehicles each and every day.

Let us help you save time and streamline your paint booth drying processes. Contact us today!