A committee of the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) is taking a different approach to the long-standing battle between shops and insurers over "featheredge, prime and block" by defining where body work ends and paint work begins. 

That in itself is not the solution, but is a key first step, much like putting together the edge pieces of a puzzle to provide a framework for the rest of the project, according to Chad Sulkala, chairman of the CIC Estimating Procedures Committee.

It's a promising first step, because the committee vice chairman happens to be the top national auto estimating consultant for State Farm. At CIC in San Francisco in mid- September, George Avery joked that he often says that if the world were to end, there'd be two things left.

"Cockroaches, and somebody walking around saying, 'What are we going to do about feather, prime and block,'" Avery said.

The committee's draft statement essentially states that body work is complete when the panel is finished to 150 grit; labor and material to then bring the panel to the level of "new and undamaged" is "a valid and required step in the repair process."

"The labor and material estimate for this operation is a judgment item on individual repair jobs," the draft statement reads. "The market will determine how the operations are listed on the repair estimate."

Some CIC participants said this statement clearly defines the "gap," although others believed it is really up to the estimating database providers to move the issue forward

"The only way we're going to remove the ambiguity that exists and put this issue, which has been haunting us year after year, to rest is to ask the data providers to clearly define all the steps," March Taylor of Autobody Hawaii said. "The database providers need to step up to the plate and realize the only way we're gong to resolve this is to clearly define the steps in the procedure pages. Then the ambiguity goes away and the market will take care of itself."

Rekeying solutions blasted

The information providers also faced criticism at CIC for their proposed solutions and timelines for addressing the issue of shops having to rekey insurer-prepared estimates.

The CIC Electronic Commerce Committee outlined two types of scenarios in which shops should be able to receive insurer-prepared estimates electronically. In the first, the insurer's estimate is prepared at the shop, so the file could be transferred to the shop's estimating system via a thumb- drive, the USB drive or even a CD or floppy disk.

The second scenario that leads to estimate rekeying is when the shop and appraiser are not at the same location and cannot physically move the estimate file from one computer to the other. The committee believes this is a more common situation leading to rekeying than is the "face-to-face" scenario.

In terms of the ability to copy an estimate file to an external drive or disk or otherwise transfer it from one computer to another within the shop, Chad Taylor of Mitchell said his company offers such capability now, and Bruce Yungkans of CCC Information Services said Pathways 4.3, released in mid-October, would as well; Yungkans said CCC's system would require a one-time set-up fee of about $150.

But Scott Jenkins of ADP drew fire from some CIC participants when said his company has no plans to create such capability, preferring to put its "development effort" into addressing the other type of scenario that requires estimate rekeying.

"What kind of 'development' does it take?" Craig Griffin of Laney's Collision Center in El Dorado, Arkansas, asked Jenkins, pointing out that virtually all software allows a user to copy a file to a disk to transfer to another computer. "My assumption is since every other software in the world allows me to do this, that it's more likely more difficult for you to keep me from doing that than it is to let me do it, other than you can't charge me for it."