I-CAR to facilitate industry repair standards

July 19, 2012

July 19, 2012, SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS—I-CAR will facilitate and maintain a centralized database of OEM-based technical repair procedures in support of an industry repair standards effort, the organization’s President and CEO John Van Alstyne announced Wednesday during the 2012 I-CAR Industry Event.

Several prominent collision repair organizations made a declaration in November 2011 recognizing published OEM-based repair procedures as the industry standard. Those groups included the Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS), Automotive Service Association (ASA), Alliance of Automotive Service Providers (AASP) and Assured Performance Network.

Since that declaration, the goal has been to compile all published OEM technical repair procedures within one centralized location to give repairers easy and affordable access to the information.

Van Alstyne said I-CAR has agreed to spearhead the effort. “We want to be responsive to the industry. We view this to be a potential solution that we can offer some value to,” he said. “We can provide a lot more knowledge and make more information available to the industry by creating a one-stop-shop for information through I-CAR.”

Van Alstyne said I-CAR would implement the following five-step approach to move the effort forward:

• Development of a repairability council that would facilitate a cross-industry meeting process. Van Alstyne said the focus of the council would be to identify what information the industry needs, and how industry professionals want to access the information.

• Creation of a knowledge portal that would include links with OEM partners and I-CAR-based information.

• Development of a repairability forum to facilitate dialog on repair processes.

• Organization of repairability summits to establish best practices for repair. Van Alstyle said repairability summit events would be driven by needs to resolve certain issues highlighted by various segments of the industry, and would be conducted two times annually.

• I-CAR will work as an OEM link to the repair industry. Van Alstyne said I-CAR will actively engage with OEM technical service teams, recommend that repairers follow OEM procedures, encourage OEM uniformity of repair information, encourage OEMs to make repair information available, provide OEMs with access to information received through its forums and summits, and provide OEMs with feedback on possible enhancements to repair procedures.

“We do a lot of this work today already, but we can do more of it,” Van Alstyne said. “We’re going to do more of what we already do.”

Van Alstyne said I-CAR would not author or publish any repair procedures. I-CAR plans to have the infrastructure in place to put the effort into production by July 2013.

“We have a lot of work to do in 2012. We have resourcing to look at, systems to look at, and we need to get a grasp of what this will cost to implement,” Van Alstyne said. “But we do have a path in place to get there.”

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