There’s a shift in the industry when it comes to repairing vehicles.
With the repair influence moving from insurance companies toward OEMs, an emphasis on replace is slowly becoming the trend in collision repair. This is to the dismay of many repair industry purists. Body labour is the repair facilities largest profit centre, thus, selling more body labour leads to a fatter bottom line. Traditionally, conventional thinking is that when you are repairing, rather than replacing, you are not disrupting factory seams or welds. Also; the repair facility is not at the mercy of back ordered parts and let us not forget, that repairing typically results in a lower invoice for the payee.
Better for long-term growth
Growing up in the industry, I have always been pro repair for the obvious reasons. However, with my transition into an OEM organization, along with my progression in the processing of production and the ability to obtain documentation provided by our OEM partners, when possible, replacing is not only better for your customers’ vehicles but it is also better for the long term growth of your business.
When deciding whether to repair or replace, the repair facility must consider the following facts. Replacing is a cleaner repair—it eliminates the human error when addressing damaged panels. When electing to replace, less materials are used when processing that repair.
Material usage
With the continue rise in pricing of materials and the lack of some insurance companies to meet the allowances of the needed materials, material usage must be considered when opting to repair or replace. Most importantly, replacing allows you to increase your facility’s throughput, allowing for you to increase your Repair Order count and repair more vehicles. Building your businesses influence in your market.
With more and more OEM vendors accommodating programs like price matching, it becomes more advantageous and financially responsible to replace rather than repair.
At Budds’ Collision, we are dedicated towards developing our own technicians. It is important for us to embed into these young technicians the advantages in replacing rather than repairing. Since there’s a steep learning curve in the road to developing these young technicians, we want to focus on repair operations that will be prevalent in the future of collision repair instead of devoting time and training our people in repair operations that will be obsolete moving forward.
The fact remains that OEMs are influencing collision repairs and replacing will become a standard operation procedure moving forward.
