The Doctor Is In: Repair Planning is the Right Remedy

by Alana Quartuccio

The prognosis is in. 

The best remedy for fixing cars correctly – in today’s complex world of collision repair – is via a repair planning approach. Making a guesstimate by way of an estimate is just not the right path toward good health for the vehicle…or the body shop.

The difference lies in making a guess versus conducting a complete diagnosis. In fact, it’s even been written in the books. The Estimate and Repair Planning Committee submitted the following terms to the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) in 2024: 

ESTIMATE: The written determination made by an appraiser or estimator, upon inspection of a damaged vehicle, regarding the cost required to restore the vehicle to the condition it was in prior to the loss.

REPAIR PLAN: A comprehensive vehicle damage assessment of necessary steps and procedures for repair created by the repair facility to determine cost of parts, labor and materials.

“A repair plan is a more thorough process that involves researching available information to ensure requirements of operations for parts and labor are documented to be completed,” explains Danny Gredinberg (Database Enhancement Gateway). 

“An estimator is someone who makes an educated guess based on a visual assessment of damage to a vehicle, and that person is limited to only what they can see and first-hand knowledge,” states Andrew Batenhorst (Pacific BMW Collision Center; Glendale, CA). “A repair planner does a complete diagnosis with a technician through the process of disassembling the vehicle, assessing all the damage the vehicle has along with all its damaged parts and the labor and materials needed – those are the three subcomponents needed to assess and determine the charge for pulling repair instructions, consulting with the various department leads within the body shop to make sure everyone’s needs are met. It’s a much more in-depth, forensic type of exploration of all the damage on the vehicle.” 

Mike Anderson (Collision Advice) suggests it may actually be less about what terms are used and more about the skill set involved in the person who does the work, because there are multiple different terms being used around the industry that have different meanings. 

“Some people call it a blue printer, while others use the word repair planner, and some people use the word estimator. And I’m sure there’s other terms that I’m not even thinking of right now,” Anderson states. “As a general consensus, no matter what term you use, everyone in the industry knows what you are referring to. But when you look at the insurance side or shop side, they are all kind of different. The estimator writes an estimate, and that is not going to be the most accurate or thorough assessment of damage. Then, the repair planner seeks to find out about the repair, which could encompass documenting all the damages through the estimating process. They could also be scheduling sublet work or determining which technician has the right skill set in order to repair a vehicle. And then you have the term blue printer which comes from reading blue prints. They blueprint everything we have to do to fix this vehicle. Basically, what we are doing is performing a damage analysis, so perhaps it could be called a damage analysis expert or assessor. Sometimes people get caught up in the terminology, but we have to look at the skill set.”

To Anderson’s point, it does come down to having the right people performing certain tasks. 

Batenhorst believes that “the word estimator needs to disappear from everyone’s vocabulary,” as he’s preached at the Society of Collision Repair Specialists IDEAS Collide Showcase at SEMA and most recently at the Southeast Collision Conference through his “Death of the Estimator Role” presentation.

He feels “very lucky because I got introduced to the concept of having a dedicated repair planner, who doesn’t have interaction with customers and is located in the back of the shop” early in his career, when he was employed by Pride Auto Body (Van Nuys, CA). 

“That’s how they structured their stores, and it worked really well. I dressed in a technician uniform, and I was always outside with a mobile workstation. This was back in 2008 and 2009, and the shop had already been doing this for years earlier. As I became more familiar with what the industry was doing overall, I found that I was the minority. When I would talk to other people in the industry about how I create a repair plan or assess damage, people would look at me kind of funny.”

He was also learning that while he was going home after an eight or nine hour work day, that wasn’t the norm for those who held an estimator role. 

“It became painfully obvious to me that some shops out there were just flying under a mentality that didn’t seem to be working and was creating byproducts as a result. So, to use the old term, estimator, these people were burnt out. They would work 10-12 hour days, had to pre-close all their files, gather payment, talk to customers, coordinate sublet, order their own parts and on and on and on. When you really strip it down, the most valuable thing a repair planner can do in the shop is to discover the damage and translate that onto a repair plan, making sure nothing was missed so that the car can go through the shop very smoothly and efficiently once it leaves the repair planning team.”

Not only will repair planning make for a smoother workflow, it helps determine the right course of action to take. 

“Modern vehicles require a ‘diagnostic’ approach to figure out what occurred and what the resolution is,” infers Gredinberg. “It requires measuring, scanning and a thorough disassembly to ensure all the parts are identified. The increased use of individual parts has also increased in vehicle design. Older vehicles did not have complicated bumper designs with only a few components. Today, cars have far more parts attached, and many times, they are not visible until you have taken apart the assembly.”

Changing the “mindset” of the consumer will be the biggest obstacle, Gredinberg suggests. “Consumers were always trained to get a few quotes prior to selecting a shop. This may have been possible and was the case years ago as vehicles did not have as many safety systems and advanced technology [as they do today].” 

Repair planning is also the right treatment for those wishing to get paid more fairly. 

Batenhorst says it’s frustrating to hear others say they don’t get paid enough for the work done or that “the labor rate isn’t enough” when the problem radiates from having the person who is supposed to make sure the shop does get paid enough “get stuck doing other things that don’t bring value to that process. If they only have 15 minutes to spend with an adjustor, and they can’t really get into the weeds with them about everything they need to be reimbursed for, of course they won’t get paid for everything. They may have to do more than one supplement, or maybe they just don’t do another supplement, and there’s no one following up on that to make sure it’s okay. There has to be a process line to keep that working correctly.”

So, how does one go about doctoring up their operation to implement this repair planning remedy?

A big component is having someone on staff dedicated as the customer-facing employee who can keep customers updated and maybe only write small estimates for customer pay work, Batenhorst recommends. “Basically, it’s taking all the non-essential tasks that a key-to-key estimator is doing now and giving that to someone else to do. It’s stripping away the tasks that interfere with the process of repair planning and moving that on to be someone else’s workload. 

“So, when I suggest getting rid of the estimator role completely, I’m suggesting to split that role up into two, or maybe three, different positions depending on the size of your shop. It allows each person to do what they do best, rather than having the estimator be the funnel to catch everything.”

Anderson agrees. “How you structure the world for that person is going to be based on the size of your shop. If you’re a small shop, the person analyzing the damage is probably going to be wearing multiple hats because you don’t have enough sales to support multiple admin people.” For shops with a larger volume of $250,000 per month or more, Anderson believes moving toward role segmentation is the right medicine. 

He suggests putting those with great people skills in charge of educating the consumer on safe and proper repairs

“They may be really good with people, but that may not necessarily mean they pay close attention to detail. They may not cross every T or get every one or two tenths on an estimate. I tend to find that those you want to analyze the damage after the vehicle has been disassembled should be more detail-oriented. You want someone who will get every nut, bolt and clip and every one-tenth on the estimate.” 

Anderson suggests taking a look at how these roles can be segmented so that an employee can be better at their job and avoid being interrupted with other tasks. “When somebody’s wearing too many hats and they get interrupted, it leads to opportunities for error by overlooking something or missing damage.” 

Unfortunately, one down side is that there is a lack of repair planner training in the industry. The repair planner is involved in the process and needs to be familiar with the repair process in order to determine what the vehicles need. “Maybe they’ve gone through basic training, but as was said at CIC and other industry events, there’s a huge lack of repair planning beyond what I-CAR offers and Collision Advice,” says Batenhorst. Repair planners don’t need to be able to perform tasks like the technicians do, but “they should be taking the same classes as a painter and as a body tech to be able to understand what it takes to do the job, so they can quantify something on a repair plan, itemize it, determine if something is an included operation or a non-included operation and learn how things get researched and translated so they can appropriately reflect it on the repair plan. So, they do need to be familiar with all aspects of the repair process.” 

Although repair planning training may need improvement as a whole, there are ways repair planners can get access to learning more, according to Batenhorst who “always was hungry to learn more, and I was fortunate that my mentor at the time recognized that I had that hunger” and allowed him to attend classes along with technicians. 

“There were years where I was going to class to learn how to paint or how to do body work, structural work and mechanical work.” He admits he got some funny looks from technicians at first, but once they saw him ask questions and try to familiarize himself with tools, they understood he was training to do his job right. 

“There really are resources out there, but sometimes repair planners are saddled up with so many other things to do that training can take a backseat. We think and assume they already know all this stuff as they were exposed to it at some point. In honor of the opportunity I had to attend classes, I have returned that favor to every repair planner who has ever worked for me, and it’s always yielded fantastic results. Yes, it costs money and time out of the shop, but the cost of not doing it is far greater than enduring the little bit of time they are not in the shop so they can come back even better than before they left.” 

Another benefit of employing a repair planner versus an estimator is the results at the end of the day that will lead to “accuracy and consistency,” shares Batenhorst on the shop’s operational standpoint. But it also makes for a happier employee. When it comes down to employee engagement and keeping people on board at your shop, “it does wonders because it leads them to a better work/life balance.”

In today’s world where people want different things out of their jobs than they did 20 years ago, making jobs more appealing is key to keeping employees happy. 

“I just had a conversation with my repair planner the other day where I asked him if he finds that his time here at the shop is balanced with his time off,” Batenhorst recalls. “I asked him if he felt he had to take work home with him emotionally or mentally or if he felt overwhelmed when he’s here. And he told me ‘no, it’s a good balance.’ He can do his work when he is at the shop and stay focused on what matters to generate a correct and proper repair plan, and he can go home at a reasonable time at the end of the day. He said he wasn’t stressed out at the end of the month. It’s much more digestible.”

Want more? Check out the July 2025 issue of Hammer & Dolly!