No matter what you call it, estimating can make or break your business. You might prefer to say your estimators are doing “blueprinting,” “damage analysis” or “repair planning.” But the term you use is meaningless to the bigger point: estimating is central to almost every metric you could use to measure your business performance. Yet I can almost bet the people doing that work within your company have not had any recent formal training.
How do I know? I began tracking it nearly 17 years ago when I first wrote and began teaching an estimating course for one of the automakers, so I can tell you with certainty that only 2 percent to 3 percent of frontline estimators and body shop managers have had any formal estimating training in the last 3-5 years.
I’m not going to sugar-coat it: that’s pathetic. How does anyone think they are capable of writing an estimate of value on a late-model vehicle when their training is that obsolete?
I can come up with at least a dozen ways this is having a negative impact on your business. How about your negotiating effectiveness, for example. Without some recent training, I can assure you that your staff is no match for the masters of controlling costs at a shop's expense (a.k.a. the insurers).
Industry surveys find that only 17 percent of shops are researching OEM repair procedures on every job. That’s likely because their estimators have not been trained on why it’s a vital step or how to do it. But how are the other 83 percent writing anything close to an accurate estimate if they don’t know what substrate materials are involved; what kind of welding, rivets or adhesive bonding will be involved; where sectioning can and cannot be done; and what items are one-time use or must be replaced rather than repaired or reused? They cannot possibly know that unless they have training in effectively researching the OEM procedures.
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What about scheduling? Most shops have figured out some system of scheduling based on the labor hours for each job. But without current training, estimators are producing half-baked estimates. The result: it’s not uncommon for shops to have two weeks of work booked into a one-week timeslot because their estimates are only half-right.
Think about the impact of poor scheduling caused by poor estimating practices. You have unhappy customers because vehicle delivery days keep slipping. Employee morale and compensation are often negatively affected. I recently helped a shop in New York with its scheduling, and one of the owners called me just a few weeks later to say the shop felt like a different place. The stress everyone felt had dissipated, and production was controlled and flowing evenly. The shop was running “like a Swiss watch,” compared to how it was when they were overloading the workshop and employees.
Even if none of this convinces you to get some current training for your estimators, surely the impact it can have on your profitability will get your attention. When I do actual field audits of shops, I see a lot of missed “low-hanging fruit” — work being performed but not billed. It’s not uncommon to see as much as 15 percent to 20 percent being missed on estimates.
There’s also work not being performed because it’s not on the paperwork that gets turned over to the production team. We all saw the liability impacts with the multi-million-dollar judgment against a Texas body shop last year. Avoiding that has to start with a strong estimating process that helps dictate the correct repair plan.
Chances are you wouldn’t think of not training your technicians. But your front-line people are essentially the first people who repair the car – only on paper. If they’re not trained in order to do that well, how can you possibly expect the people in the back to make up for the deficient estimates and processes up front? That’s never going to happen.
I’ll offer some specific steps to improve your estimating in future columns. In the meantime, get some training on your estimators' schedules.
