Four Route Vans Staged on One Monday Morning

The first van in gets the spectrophotometer work, the spray out cards and the tinting. That process is the same amount of effort whether you are painting one van or six, and on a fleet livery it is worth more effort than usual because the goal is not matching the existing paint on each van. The goal is a single target colour that all four will share when they are parked next to each other.

That is a different brief and it changes the decision. Two of these vans had faded noticeably more than the other two, and matching each one to itself would have produced four vans that matched their own history and not each other. So we matched to the least faded unit, which meant the other three received more coverage, and we wrote that into the estimate as a deliberate choice rather than discovering it halfway through.

Finishing van one completely before starting van two is the intuitive approach and it is the slowest. Every operation has a setup cost: mixing material, masking, cleaning a gun, changing to a different abrasive. Doing that setup four times for each operation wastes a substantial fraction of the labor.

So the vans move in a pipeline. Van one goes into teardown and bodywork. When it moves to prep, van two enters teardown. When van one enters the booth, van two is in bodywork and van three arrives. Because paint hours dominate the schedule, the booth becomes the pacing resource and everything else is arranged to keep it fed.

• Teardown, bodywork, prep, booth, cure, reassembly as a pipeline
• Each operation set up once per batch, not once per unit
• The booth is the pacing resource, so it is never idle
• Cure time on one unit is productive time on another

Our booth is 60 feet long, which is sized for full length coaches. A standard wheelbase cargo van is a little over twenty feet. Two of them nose to tail fit with working room, which means a batch of four becomes two booth cycles rather than four when the colour is identical and the masking schedule allows it.

That only works when the units genuinely share a colour and a clear. Introduce a second colour and the advantage disappears, because the gun and the lines have to be cleaned between them and the two vans in the booth are then sequential anyway. It is a real efficiency and it depends entirely on the fleet having standardised its livery, which is an argument for standardising it.

The hidden problem on this job was not paint. It was that the existing graphics could not be reused, the fleet's original artwork file had been lost two printers ago, and reproducing the livery meant recreating vector artwork from photographs and then printing four sets. That process took eleven working days and it was the longest single item on the schedule.

We now ask for artwork status at the estimate stage on any commercial batch, before a single van is booked in. If artwork exists, the printing runs in parallel with bodywork and arrives during cure. If it does not, the fleet finds out at estimate time rather than discovering it while four vans sit finished and unlettered in the yard.

The fourth van stayed untouched until the first three were done. Not for scheduling reasons but as a reference: graphic placement, the position of a fleet number, the height of a lettering baseline, the exact spot a door decal sits relative to a handle. Photographs help and a physical vehicle in the yard is better, especially when the original placement was itself inconsistent.

It also gives the fleet a comparison. Standing the first finished van beside the untouched one, in daylight, is how a fleet manager confirms he is getting what he asked for while three more are still in progress and changes are still cheap. That conversation on day six is worth a great deal more than the same conversation on day nineteen.

The fleet could spare two units. That meant the pipeline had to be arranged so no more than two were in our possession at once, which is a tighter constraint than it sounds because cure time and reassembly hold a unit after the interesting work is finished. We handled it by returning each van the same day it was reassembled rather than holding the batch for a single handover.

That produces four separate collections instead of one, which is more administration for everybody and considerably less lost route time for the fleet. It is the right trade for a working fleet and the wrong trade for a fleet whose vehicles are cosmetic assets. Asking which one you are dealing with is part of writing the estimate.

1. Confirm artwork status before booking any unit in
2. Match one target colour for the batch, not each van to itself
3. Run teardown, bodywork, booth and reassembly as a pipeline
4. Pair identical colour units in the booth where masking allows
5. Hold one unit untouched as a placement reference
6. Return each van on completion rather than holding the batch