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With the popularity of Ranger and Everest, our Ford Customer Service Division (FCSD) has been strategically focused on enhancing our workshop capacity and improving customer convenience. In great news, staying focused on these objectives has delivered results for service retention, where almost 50% of owners in year 5 have returned for servicing — an 18% increase in recent years.
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Pic 1: GEMBA identified three key issues that represented a booking opportunity.
Boosting operational efficiency
With our need to increase capacity and reduce customer wait lead times, we focused on bolstering our operational efficiency in the workshop and reinforcing customer trust.
FCSD has worked with dealers on their facility investments, where Dealers have invested into brick-and-mortar initiatives. For other dealers, technician recruitment initiatives was a key focus where we could increase our Express Service operation to hiring skilled technicians for diagnosis and repairs.
Recognising an industry wide shortage for technicians, FCSD also launched a new training and sponsorship program to grow the number of technicians and to increase their skills and competency. This included sponsoring international teams to address our local shortage. Many of these new recruits are now working in dealerships, delivering for our customers.
For customers, convenience is critical
As we focused on capacity and customer convenience, we saw a way to win at both by optimising servicing scheduling. In early 2025, we completed a GEMBA with nearly 20 Dealers to identify opportunities to enhance scheduling systems (see pic 1).
This led to increased training and familiarity with Xtime (Ford’s scheduling system), which enabled servicing teams to unlock previously restricted sellable hours. Xtime was modernised to allow team-based servicing, which better reflected workshop efficiencies. For example, Express Servicing (a choreographed 2 technician approach to servicing on the same hoist to enhance productivity), can now be scheduled at 120% - 140% efficiency, enabling faster completion of routine services, while more complex diagnostic work is allotted at 85% efficiency.
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Table 1: Table 1: By pairing 2 technicians, we can service more vehicles through efficiency gains.
"The Express Service program has played a key role in supporting Dealership workshop capacity and service growth in 2025 and, most importantly offering Ford owners the convenience of 'while you wait' servicing." - Michael Fitzpatrick, FCSD Zone Manager
Improving lead times
Responding to dealer feedback, Ford Australia became the first global market to automate recall times into the scheduling system, ensuring these accurately reflect current requirements.
Previously, all recalls were pre-set at 30 minutes without manual intervention. Now, a two hour recall will accurately reflect so to ensure scheduling is accurate, allowing our Ford Dealers a greater opportunity to sell their hours available.
Coupling this with the increased productivity from Express Service, we have been able to substantially reduce the next available general servicing appointment slot (lead time). As an illustration, one dealership saw its lead times drop from 42 days to just 4 days after implementing updated Xtime settings.
Shorter wait times
In Service Marketing, Express Service sustainment has been a priority. With over 100 participating dealers, a ‘divide & conquer’ plan delivered a very strong output improvement, achieving a national average exceeding 11 Repair Orders (ROs) per bay, per day. That’s over 25,000 general services per month that are completed through an Express Service Bay, making Australia the lead market within IMG. That’s a considerable lift vs. Jan-25 where our national average was 7.5 ROs per bay, per day. This enhanced productivity, alongside increased technician and bay counts, has directly contributed to shorter customer waiting times.
“Express Service has greatly improved our number of throughputs each day. Our express service bay completes between 12 and 17 cars per day with an average of around 130-140% efficiency on the bay. Due to this, our appointment lead time has significantly decreased from roughly two weeks to two days.”
~ Trent Smith, Fixed Operations Manager at Jackson Ford (Tasmania).
Making our customers’ lives easier
Beyond the workshops, customer convenience has been further bolstered by the successful adoption of Online Service Reservation (OSR), Vehicle Loaner Program and Pickup & Delivery, which are all designed to streamline the customer experience.
123,000 additional sellable hours!
Collectively, these efforts - investments into brick & mortar, technician recruitment & training, express servicing, and automating scheduling times - has generated an impressive 123,000 additional sellable hours across Ford workshops in 2025 vs. 2024, the equivalent of employing 90 full-time technicians. The national average appointment lead time for general servicing decreased from 12 days to 4 days in 2025 and, importantly, dealer feedback is great.
Good for customers, good for Dealers, good for Ford
This has promoted our unwavering commitment to increase our operational capacity and improve customer convenience, which strengthens our entire dealer network, and reinforces trust in the Ford brand. Ultimately, these initiatives in 2025 allowed us to tackle capacity opportunities.
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