Collision Industry Conference

by Alana Quartuccio

“Your voice matters.”

Collision Industry Conference (CIC) Chair Dan Risley conveyed this strong message in his opening remarks during the July conference held in Denver, CO. His encouragement set the tone for a day filled with enlightening discussions that explored technologies, questioned the intentions of proposed federal Right to Repair legislation and unleashed a chorus of alarm and concerns over the asTech/GEICO standardized pricing agreement, which had just been announced the previous day. 

First to respond to Risley’s urging to take advantage of open mic time was Bob McSherry (North Haven Auto Body; North Haven, CT), who sought answers from asTech representatives about news of the aforementioned agreement. “Can you please explain to me why you – a vendor that I use – would enter into a standardized pricing agreement on behalf of the customer, which is me?” He proceeded to call it a “special kind of stupid. I’ve been a long-time user, and I can tell you that comes to an end when I go back to work tomorrow. If someone can enlighten me, I would really like to know why you would enter into an agreement on my behalf with an insurance carrier. It absolutely freaking baffles me.” 

Responding for asTech was Jason Vilardi, vice president of sales, insurance and estimatics relations, who claimed the agreement would not change their position to do safe and proper repairs and that “we did this for our customers to streamline everything from them to make the process easier. We didn’t really take this as being a massively negative thing; we got a top carrier who most people would say they’ve struggled with, and now we brought them in on what we do, how we do it and – in our minds – are willing to almost step up and actually cover more OEM scans than they every previously did.” He further claimed that asTech customers “should not feel a change in the reimbursement process.” 

 Society of Collision Repair Specialists Executive Director Aaron Schulenburg brought forth an “elephant-in-the-room” question which he directed to Vilardi: “Jason, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but the answer that I heard was that they endorsed your product…what I’m curious about is, was the standardized pricing agreement predicated on the endorsement of your product? So, was this standardized pricing a result of the endorsement?” 

Vilardi evaded, “A customer is still in the same position they were beforehand. They’re not making less money from us on a scan today than they made yesterday, although the price is less. The cost is less, so they will be made whole in their numbers.” 

Mike Anderson (Collision Advice) came forward to voice concerns about “the precedent it sets for taking the collision repair professional out of the equation as it’s my understanding that the asTech/Repairify software is going to determine whether an aftermarket scan tool suffices or an OEM scan tool. They’re making that determination, not the shop, not the consumer, not the OEM certification program, but their software device is, if that’s accurate.

“It disregards anything that engineers from the OEMs have told us in regard to OEM scan tools,” Anderson continued. “As someone who has the blessing and opportunity to work with a lot of OEMs, I can stand here, 1,000 percent without hesitation or reservation, and say there is a huge difference between an aftermarket and OEM scan tool.” 

Conversations brought other concerns to light. The Parts and Materials Committee brought Schulenburg, Wayne Weikel (Alliance for Automotive Innovation) and Bob Redding (Automotive Service Association) to the stage to dive into the intentions of the proposed REPAIR Act, expressing that this legislation is less about independent repairers having access to information to fix vehicles properly and more about protecting parts choices. 

Schulenburg used what the CAR Coalition says about the proposed bills as an example of the real intentions behind the bill and those championing it. They define its goal as being to ”protect the ability to get the parts, tools and information to choose aftermarket parts. That’s different from making sure that consumers have the right to choose a repairer who has the parts, tools and information to fix cars. That’s a very specific purpose. If you read through it, you start to understand where the focus is. The focus is on protecting the choice of a part type rather than necessarily protecting the type of repair or protecting safety. The REPAIR Act doesn’t mention safety anywhere. It’s not a bill that talks about consumers having the right to choose or not be influenced or be limited or things along those lines. So when you start looking at the drivers behind that and look at groups like the CAR Coalition, you have lots of aftermarket parts companies, alternative parts platforms, insurance companies and things along those lines. So in my opinion, both bills are very much parts acts; one is about protecting the right to choose aftermarket parts, and the other is about limiting intellectual property protection for OEMs on patents, and they’re really both focused on parts initiatives.”

Weikel added that a lot of time has been spent up at Capitol Hill by the other side to present the bill as “Right to Repair, but they don’t actually represent repairers. The REPAIR Act has been framed to present this as the ability to complete a repair when that’s not really what it’s about.” 

Schulenburg hopes “conversations can shift from simply preserving a consumer’s choice for one type of part, to a consumer having the ability to choose where they want to have their vehicle repaired, how they want to have it repaired and with what type of parts they want it repaired, whether that means they want an original part or an alternative part, whether they want to go to an insurance preferred shop or an OEM-preferred shop. It should be focused on making sure that consumers are entitled to safe, proper and thorough repairs.”

“What Aaron is saying is very important,” stressed Redding. “When we go into the Congressional Office about our position and tell them we don’t support these bills as they’re currently drafted, their response is ‘I don’t understand that; we’re doing this to help you.’ They don’t understand all the dynamics of these various industry sectors. When you explain it to them, they get it, so we’re trying to shift this debate to if you are going to do a repair bill, that affects all repairers – mechanical and collision – it needs to do what we want it to do.

“It’s difficult to put the toothpaste back in the tube, so it’s critical we get this bill right,” he added. 

For the third time on the CIC stage, discussion continued about the SCRS blend study, but this time, the conversation focused on the “significant amount of changes” that are now taking place with shops’ billing and insurance claim practices. Schulenburg was joined by a panel of technical experts from some of the leading paint manufacturers including Jeff Wildman and Ralph Lieja (BASF), Mark Jahnke (Axalta) and Ryan Brown (AkzoNobel) who shared their respective companies’ processes for developing their paint systems bringing to light that variations and variables that need to be considered, which verifies the importance of having different conversations in order to arm the repair planner with the right dialogue to have with the bill payer. 

 Michael Lastuka of State Farm and Darrell Amberson (LaMettry’s Collision; MN) were also on hand to contribute some poignant observations from the perspective of both insurers and repairers. Lastuka expressed agreement about having the right conversations, stating that “knowledge is power” and stressing that shops should take the time to communicate.

Danny Gredinberg (Database Enhancement Gateway) led the Estimating and Repair Planning Committee’s critical “on-the-spot evaluation” discussion “because no two accidents, no two repairs are identical to each other.” 

Using CCC Estimated Worktime Premise as an example, Gredinberg pointed out, “There’s a lot of details in there, especially the list of operations that are commonly not factored or included in any of the published labor times here. And when you go down this list of operations, there are nearly 43 Estimated Worktime Operations just in this section alone on the body side. That’s not factored into any published labor time.”

Communication is key in the process, and it’s a fact-based conversation, not an emotional one, Gredinberg suggested. “We need to make sure the right people are getting that communication – our repair planners, estimators, CSRs, people on the front end who can identify these challenges or these potential things that are going to blow up in the middle of the repair process so we can have the right materials, we can have the right supplies, we can have the right consideration, so you can have the right discussion with the person who is going to reimburse for that bill, whether it be the customer or the bill payer itself.” 

The Future Disruptions Committee panelists sought answers to the question: How can automation be used to make auto body facilities more efficient?

Darrell Amberson foresees it being used for the “monumental task” in administrative work due to the trend of needing to provide “more documentation to prove what we’re doing in terms of the repair process to protect ourselves and to offer verification to the insurers. Half our staff essentially does admin support work, planning, organizing, orchestrating, interacting with customers that isn’t part of directly fixing the car, so there would be huge value if there were things that could improve that efficiency. We really haven’t seen a lot of that.” 

“What is it going to take to get automated refinishing, for example?” moderator Trent Tinsley (Entegral) inquired. “There are some products out there right now that automate welding. How far away are we from doing that? They can do some basic things now; I saw demonstrations at SEMA. They can do some welding operations on a wheel. But how far away are we from automating those sorts of things in the shop? I don’t think we’re anywhere near where we could be.”

The next CIC meeting will be held November 5 in Las Vegas during SEMA 2024. Visit ciclink.com for more information. 

Want more? Check out the September 2024 issue of New England Automotive Report!