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After hearing good things about the service at Auto Collision Service in New Castle, DE, I decided to look into the shop’s practices to find what methods they use to ensure customer satisfaction.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

The motto at Auto Collision Service is that they “meet a lot of nice people by accident.” The goal at the shop is to focus on the customer and make sure all vehicles are repaired at the highest quality achievable.

According to owner, Pat Henry, “We have always felt that you are only as good as the last vehicle that you fix. If you lose sight of that, that is when things will fall through the cracks and you end up disappointing someone. Here at Auto Collision Service we all take great pride in what we do and we are never satisfied with the status quo.”

Auto Collision Service offers a comprehensive summary of their process on their website to aid customers in understanding what will happen to their vehicle while in the shop. This process includes removal of parts and estimate, arrival of parts, structural and body repair, painting, vehicle reassembly, and delivery to customer.

The website also provides customers with the opportunity to monitor the repair status of their vehicle, and an optional survey allows customers to provide feedback to aid Auto Collision Service in adjusting their procedures to best achieve the customer satisfaction they desire.

Business owners who are struggling in a tight economy may be looking to shed some payroll costs by replacing employees with independent contractors. Some who pursue this strategy decide to lay off employees and hire independent contractors while others may rebrand some or all of their employees as independent contractors. This reclassification may result in lower payroll costs and more profitable workers, but is not without significant peril.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

State and federal governments have a strong incentive to make sure that businesses do not avoid taxes or circumvent employee protection laws by improperly labeling workers as independent contractors. Workers may also independently sue for misclassification. As a result, misclassification of any worker as an independent contractor may turn out to be much more costly than any benefits obtained through the misclassification. This article discusses the distinction between employees and independent contractors, the pitfalls associated with classifying auto body workers as independent contractors, and offers suggestions on how to set up a working relationship that is legal and beneficial to both the auto body shop and the worker.

Hiring independent contractors may be advantageous to a business:  Independent contractors may be cheaper, more efficient, and better motivated to work than employees due to the manner in which their compensation is structured. Independent contractors are paid based on the actual repairs they perform whereas employees are paid based on the number of hours they work. Independent contractors do not get paid overtime even when they work beyond a regular workday. Furthermore, if independent contractors fail to perform the repairs adequately they will not be paid, whereas employees must be paid for the hours they work but may be fired for poor performance.

by Harry Klein, Customer Engagement
Strategies, www.customerengagement.com

What’s the first image that comes to mind for a customer about to walk into a body shop? Dirt? Grease? Noise? Is there a waiting area? Is it some dark, post-apocalyptic movie scene?

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

Happily, this is a thing of the past in most shops, because many in the auto collision repair industry have awakened to the power and value of putting the customer at the center of their business strategy. There’s a Lean Production revolution starting in the industry and it’s having a profound impact for early proponents.

First let’s level the playing field about Lean Production. According to the Lean Enterprise Institute, there are five principles of lean:
1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
3. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.
4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
5. As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

I have written about two dealerships recently, the Lasher Auto Group, and Acura of Westchester, and their common ground to success. They both have a positive attitude. They take pride in their work, and enjoy taking good care of their customers. They deliver their service along with the parts. Their customers know that their business is valued, and become loyal partners of the dealership. Everyone is making money and staying happy!

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

This commitment to customer service would be impossible, however, without support from the manufacturer. In this case the manufacturer is Honda/Acura, and the support is awesome. Once there was a time when manufacturer’s parts reps considered the dealers as their customers; looking no further for more business. But times have changed. Now, Honda/Acura has a division, with fourteen field representatives, actively helping their dealers service their collision customers.

American Honda’s Collision Select Program is a wholesale support initiative, available to both Honda and Acura dealers, and supported by OEConnection’s CollisionLink product, which is OEConnection’s online parts procurement and management tool. CollisionLink is supported by GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Toyota, Infiniti, Lexus, Honda and Acura parts orders. Some of the major benefits of CollisionLink are:

Memorable partnerships make for great history: Hope and Crosby; Mantle and Maris; Jobs and Wozniak; Donny and Marie; Tom and Jerry—to name but a few. American Honda and OEConnection’s (OEC) CollisionLink® program can now be included on that renowned list of successful alliances. Since 2009, the automaker’s wholesale parts program, Collision Select, has connected a large number of body shops to their Honda and Acura dealerships’ parts departments via OEC’s CollisionLink parts procurement system. Through Honda’s program, the carmaker enables its participating dealers to assist body shops in enhancing their cycle times, alleviating shop returns, and streamlining parts ordering, but most importantly for repairers and parts managers, it allows shops to incorporate more Honda and Acura Genuine parts into their repairs.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

To further support an already healthy working relationship, American  Honda is providing additional support  to its dealers, through an aggressive promotional campaign known as “A Perfect Pair,” designed to provide further exposure and ultimately sign up additional collision facilities nationwide.

OEC’s Director of OEM Program Management, Bill Lopez, 47, has seen the collision industry from disparate perspectives over the past 22 years. After college he worked as a Claims Manager with Farmers Insurance, where he learned estimate writing, the importance of cycle times and the issues common to insurers, body shops and their customers. He also worked in business development with a paint manufacturer, an online estimating company and even joined an internet startup for a time in Silicon Valley.

Ok, who out there knows everything about automotive repair? Who out there has seen it all, and wouldn’t be surprised if something so common to do now turns out to be not so common? Well, one thing is for sure—it ain’t me. I learn something new about this crazy car business every day. Especially when it comes to the electronics in today’s cars.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

Even though I’ve spent a lifetime repairing these electrical nightmares that come into my shop, it still has its surprises. These days it’s not only the wiring, but some of the results I see from the scanners that can be just as unexpected.

My buddy Tom’s 2005 Cadillac Escalade EXT was having some problems. It’s a well kept, clean and in great shape ride. The suspension system was sending the driver its little notice across the dash message banner, “Suspension system service needed”.

“Sure, bring it in Tom. I’ll throw it on the scanner and see what’s going on,” I told my old pal.

I grabbed the Tech 2 with the CAN unit hooked up to it and headed to the car. Only one code, C0660 was stored—“Level Control Exhaust Valve”.

What may have seemed to some at the most recent Collision Industry Conference (CIC) as a debate about esoteric computer jargon was actually a discussion about who gets access to all the information in a shop’s estimates.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Fred Iantorno of the Collision Industry Electronic Commerce Association (CIECA) said the way a shop’s estimating data currently flows through any of the current electronic connections in the industry—to the shop’s management system, to insurers, to parts suppliers, to rental car companies or CSI providers—can be compared to repairing a car without applying the needed corrosion protection.

“You can’t see what’s inside of these systems to see if the corrosion protection has been put there or not,” Iantorno said. “But over time, it’s like a time bomb waiting to happen. The rust will show up, because essentially the corrosion protection hasn’t been changed since 1999.”

Iantorno, along with a number of collision repair trade associations and organizations, has been lobbying for a shift by the information providers away from using the older “EMS” standard for transferring estimate data to using the news “BMS” standard. Understanding what those acronyms stand for is less important, he said, than understanding the key difference between the two.

The CAA Pasadena/Foothill General Chapter meeting was held September 15, 2011, at the Brookside Country Club, Pasadena, CA, was presided over by Linda Holcomb, President. She announced that she and a few other members of the CAA had met with an AQMD committee about Rule 1147 recently. The rule would have required many shop owners to install expensive equipment to control noxious emissions. At the meeting, the CAA members succeeded in getting the AQMD to postpone costly regulations for shops.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

The September 15 meeting was essentially divided into two parts. To amplify what Linda and her group had accomplished, there was an expert update on Rule 1147, by Anthony W. (Tony) Endres, president of Furnace Dynamics, Inc. His clients include companies that generate millions of BTUs monthly and yet the AQMD rule affects body shops that generate a tiny fraction of that.

Endres notes that a typical collision repair shop generates less than a pound of pollutants per month, and only about 12.4 pounds of NOX per year. Mr. Endres has challenged both the deadline for implementing the rule and the appropriateness of the rule at all for collision shops. In his update he was able to announce a five-year extension for implementing the rule for collision shops, and eventually for making shops totally exempt from the rule.

by Greg Horn, Vice President of Industry
Relations, Mitchell International

In my recent Industry Trends feature article, Timing is Everything: Total Loss Values and Gas Prices, I explored the impact of rising fuel prices on resale values. This phenomenon initially interested me because I had traded in my Chevrolet Suburban for a more fuel efficient vehicle just before fuel prices reached above $2.40 per gallon. Not too soon after, fuel prices rose to near record levels for the second time in recent history.

To view a PDF of this article, including all referenced graphs, please click HERE.

What we witnessed in this recent rise was, in large part, due to a group of futures investors. These speculators bet on the rise of fuel prices, and their investment actions in turn caused prices to remain inflated even when the price of the crude oil had fallen and production was not an issue.

In early May, the situation with gasoline futures became so intense the Obama Administration released some strategic oil supply onto the market to ease the spiraling price at the pumps, at least temporarily.  There are a few important questions we need to answer to fully understand this chain of events and how the industry can learn from it:
1.  What is the relationship between fuel prices and resale values?
2. What can collision repairers do about the total loss decision process that is primarily in insurance companies’ hands?

It’s a common complaint among collision repairers: It’s not worth contacting the state insurance commissioner’s office because they don’t do anything about our complaints.

To view a PDF of this article please click HERE.

Yet in recent months, some state insurance commissioners have taken actions cheered by some shops, from radically changing their department’s focus, to issuing bulletins reminding insurers of state laws on steering or other shop-related activities.

What has led to these changes, and does it mean now is a good time for shops to reassess their interactions with state insurance regulators?

Some Success Stories
For decades, shops in many states have taken concerns about auto insurer practices to insurance divisions only quite often to be told, in essence, that such regulators are there to address consumer complaints about insurers, not business-to-business issues.

But even that mission isn’t being met well in some states. When John Doak took the helm of the Oklahoma Insurance Department earlier this year, he quickly announced  he was reorganizing the department’s anti-fraud division to focus on investigating insurance company fraud against consumers, rather than the other way around.