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To view a pdf file of this article with photos, click HERE.

I wrote an article a few months ago focusing on inefficiency within body shops. That is, inefficiencies that are most commonly associated with the repair process. If it takes you seven days to repair a vehicle and the shop down the street could have done it in five days, you’ve just cost everyone money.

I recognize that all shops shouldn’t be painted with the same broad brush, but in my view, if you’re inefficient you’re guilty by association. Because of inefficiencies, insurers unnecessarily spend money every day that could have been used to lower premiums or offset the impact of a rate increase. Yes, most insurance companies are profitable, but it’s not as a result of all the great deeds and service provided by body shops.

To view a pdf file of this article with photos, click HERE.

The collision repair world is changing rapidly these days. I recently attended an autobody association meeting where a representative from Toyota introduced their new Parts Bridge product. The estimating system with which they decide to integrate this product will have exact manufacturer’s billing prices and technical service bulletin information to ensure parts are installed properly. It was suggested that this product would eliminate most supplements. Suddenly a large part of the estimator’s job would be reduced greatly.

At the same time, the competition for jobs is heating up more and more, and consolidators are buying up many of the existing shops. The result of this is sort of a Walmart versus local merchants war. Smaller shops are finding it much harder to compete when a chain of franchise or consolidator shops is gobbling up the lion’s share of the work in an area. How can they fight back?

To view a pdf file of this article with photos, click HERE.

People used to think that blogs were light and breezy, written mostly by soccer moms or retired teachers and featuring their poetry, baby pictures and long-winded opinion pieces. But  over the years blogs have changed in a big way. Nowdays, experts on certain subjects will go to blogs exclusively to see what they can’t find anywhere else on the Internet. Blogs have gone from irrelevant to pertinent within the past five years, and today more companies than ever (including body shops) have one blog and maybe even more.

For those of you who have been inside fixing cars too long and don’t know what a blog is, here is my elevator speech. A blog is the morphing of two words (web–log) and in simple terms, it’s a discussion-based or informational site published on the web and including a series of entries (also known as posts) typically displayed in reverse chronological order.

To view a pdf file of this article with photos, click HERE.

The industry has been inundated with news about consolidators buying new locations and expanding into markets where they have not traditionally had a presence. To be honest, it’s happening at such a rapid pace that most of us in the insurance industry were caught off guard. In an economy that has struggled, the last thing we expected was capital investment firms plunking down large sums of money to purchase consolidators and then provide capital for aggressive growth. Existing large consolidators investing their own money to buy additional locations was even more surprising to insurers.