By Heidi Harris, Director, Solutions Engineer
In the collision repair world, the difference between a good year and a great year often comes down to small details: a few minutes saved on a tear-down, an hour of labor that wasn’t wasted, or a supplement caught before it turned into a costly delay.
We consistently find that the most successful shops share a core philosophy. They have moved beyond end-of-month reporting to embrace real-time management across their three most vital operational pillars: labor assignments, repair plans, and job costing.
This isn't about working harder; It’s about replacing guesswork with instant knowledge, giving you the power to make profitable course corrections the moment they are identified.
The Blueprint: Building a Live Repair Plan
Your repair plan is more than just an estimate; it should be the living, breathing blueprint for the repair. Unfortunately, too many shops still treat it as a static document, leading to the single greatest source of friction and delay: the supplement process.
Without real-time tracking of labor and parts against the initial plan, teams may not spot required changes until a technician is well into the repair. This forces the tech to stop, a supplement to be created, an approval delay, and an inevitable disruption to cycle time.
A modern, real-time system demands that your repair plan is constantly updated as work is completed. This forces accountability at the ground level and ensures your estimators, production managers, and even technicians are notified of deviations immediately, allowing them to initiate supplements or parts orders before the repair comes to a standstill. In essence, a real-time plan is a defensive shield against unplanned downtime.
Growing vehicle complexity is likely to further increase the number of supplements needed. Delays in their approval could significantly slow cycle times, making it critical for shops to streamline this process digitally to avoid unnecessary delays.
- Crash Course Q3 2024
The Engine: Dynamic Labor Assignments
Your technicians are your greatest asset, and your technicians' idle time is your greatest liability. If your team is ever standing around waiting for direction, parts, or a decision, you have a labor assignment problem. This is precisely why managing labor in real-time is the single biggest productivity lever you can pull today.
One of our latest Run My Business Videos, 3 Must-Know Labor Assignment Hacks, reinforces this idea, highlighting the critical nature of using a digital system to track hours as work happens. By adopting a real-time digital assignment process, you enable three key hacks for efficiency:
- Assign at the Start: Know exactly who is responsible for what work before anyone touches the car, establishing clear expectations and accountability.
- Track Real-Time Hours: Instantly catch bottlenecks, monitor technician efficiency, and see production capacity across the floor. This immediate visibility eliminates the guesswork production managers often rely on.
- Review Before Payroll: Use daily data to preemptively catch errors and disputes before payday, saving administrative time and preserving trust with your team.
When you actively monitor and manage your production schedule based on actual work performed, not just estimated hours, you unlock capacity.
Labor rates are a major driver of repair cost increases, with Q1 2025 seeing a 3.2% increase year-over-year relative to Q1 2024 (following a 4.5% increase in 2024). This makes it essential for shops to capture all labor hours and properly assign work to ensure the shop's overhead is covered.
- Crash Course Q3 2025
The Scorecard: Accurate Job Costing
Perhaps the most critical function of a real-time system is its ability to deliver accurate job costing, not days or weeks later, but right now.
Too many shops operate on the assumption that their estimated profit margin will hold true. They only discover the truth when their accountant closes the books. By then, it's too late to correct the job that was marginally profitable or the one that lost money entirely due to:
- Unassigned hours for a technician
- Parts ordered off-the-books or outside the system
- Excessive use of materials that weren’t properly billed or captured
Real-time job costing ties all the moving parts together; labor hours, paint and material usage, parts delivery status, and gives you a live financial picture of the repair order margin. It’s the only way to know your true profit per repair as the vehicle moves through the facility. This financial clarity allows you to make strategic decisions on everything from technician compensation to your insurance partner mix.
The Real-Time Mandate
My advice is simple: the era of paper trails, static reports, and end-of-day allocations is over. These legacy processes generate massive data gaps where profit inevitably leaks out.
The competitive edge in collision repair is no longer found in simply fixing cars quickly; it is found in the ability to run a unified, transparent, and instantly adaptable operation.
Implementing a real-time solution for your labor assignments, repair planning, and job costing isn't an upgrade, it's the mandate for survival and growth.
For more actionable tips, focused on your success as a business owner or operator, watch and subscribe to our Run My Business channel on YouTube.
By Heidi Harris, Director, Solutions Engineer
In the collision repair world, the difference between a good year and a great year often comes down to small details: a few minutes saved on a tear-down, an hour of labor that wasn’t wasted, or a supplement caught before it turned into a costly delay.
We consistently find that the most successful shops share a core philosophy. They have moved beyond end-of-month reporting to embrace real-time management across their three most vital operational pillars: labor assignments, repair plans, and job costing.
This isn't about working harder; It’s about replacing guesswork with instant knowledge, giving you the power to make profitable course corrections the moment they are identified.
The Blueprint: Building a Live Repair Plan
Your repair plan is more than just an estimate; it should be the living, breathing blueprint for the repair. Unfortunately, too many shops still treat it as a static document, leading to the single greatest source of friction and delay: the supplement process.
Without real-time tracking of labor and parts against the initial plan, teams may not spot required changes until a technician is well into the repair. This forces the tech to stop, a supplement to be created, an approval delay, and an inevitable disruption to cycle time.
A modern, real-time system demands that your repair plan is constantly updated as work is completed. This forces accountability at the ground level and ensures your estimators, production managers, and even technicians are notified of deviations immediately, allowing them to initiate supplements or parts orders before the repair comes to a standstill. In essence, a real-time plan is a defensive shield against unplanned downtime.
Growing vehicle complexity is likely to further increase the number of supplements needed. Delays in their approval could significantly slow cycle times, making it critical for shops to streamline this process digitally to avoid unnecessary delays.
- Crash Course Q3 2024
The Engine: Dynamic Labor Assignments
Your technicians are your greatest asset, and your technicians' idle time is your greatest liability. If your team is ever standing around waiting for direction, parts, or a decision, you have a labor assignment problem. This is precisely why managing labor in real-time is the single biggest productivity lever you can pull today.
One of our latest Run My Business Videos, 3 Must-Know Labor Assignment Hacks, reinforces this idea, highlighting the critical nature of using a digital system to track hours as work happens. By adopting a real-time digital assignment process, you enable three key hacks for efficiency:
- Assign at the Start: Know exactly who is responsible for what work before anyone touches the car, establishing clear expectations and accountability.
- Track Real-Time Hours: Instantly catch bottlenecks, monitor technician efficiency, and see production capacity across the floor. This immediate visibility eliminates the guesswork production managers often rely on.
- Review Before Payroll: Use daily data to preemptively catch errors and disputes before payday, saving administrative time and preserving trust with your team.
When you actively monitor and manage your production schedule based on actual work performed, not just estimated hours, you unlock capacity.
Labor rates are a major driver of repair cost increases, with Q1 2025 seeing a 3.2% increase year-over-year relative to Q1 2024 (following a 4.5% increase in 2024). This makes it essential for shops to capture all labor hours and properly assign work to ensure the shop's overhead is covered.
- Crash Course Q3 2025
The Scorecard: Accurate Job Costing
Perhaps the most critical function of a real-time system is its ability to deliver accurate job costing, not days or weeks later, but right now.
Too many shops operate on the assumption that their estimated profit margin will hold true. They only discover the truth when their accountant closes the books. By then, it's too late to correct the job that was marginally profitable or the one that lost money entirely due to:
- Unassigned hours for a technician
- Parts ordered off-the-books or outside the system
- Excessive use of materials that weren’t properly billed or captured
Real-time job costing ties all the moving parts together; labor hours, paint and material usage, parts delivery status, and gives you a live financial picture of the repair order margin. It’s the only way to know your true profit per repair as the vehicle moves through the facility. This financial clarity allows you to make strategic decisions on everything from technician compensation to your insurance partner mix.
The Real-Time Mandate
My advice is simple: the era of paper trails, static reports, and end-of-day allocations is over. These legacy processes generate massive data gaps where profit inevitably leaks out.
The competitive edge in collision repair is no longer found in simply fixing cars quickly; it is found in the ability to run a unified, transparent, and instantly adaptable operation.
Implementing a real-time solution for your labor assignments, repair planning, and job costing isn't an upgrade, it's the mandate for survival and growth.
For more actionable tips, focused on your success as a business owner or operator, watch and subscribe to our Run My Business channel on YouTube.
