AkzoNobel drives color innovation with Colorvation

The car repair industry has come a long way over the past decade. With technology and industries continuing to develop, professionals are constantly being challenged to keep up with the times. AkzoNobel is focused on helping its customers take the journey towards total digital adoption, which means preparing customers to embrace a digital way of working — Colorvation and its digital tooling.

"Colorvation is taking the digital color matching process to the next level. Colorvation is not only a unique and comprehensive but most of all a user-friendly approach that features the most advanced digital color technology available," said Peter Tomlinson - Global Managing Director for AkzoNobel Vehicle Refinishes. "Incorporating our state-of-the-art digital tools into how our customers work has helped produce outstanding results. Moving to a digital platform removes visual subjectivity from the color selection and matching processes, and replaces it with consistent, accurate results. Digital matching means fewer errors and reduced cycle time, leading to a consequent reduction in costs, an increase in the potential number of vehicles going through the shops. Good news I would say!"

The patented Automatchic Vision and MIXIT are the two foundations of Colorvation, an approach that increases speed and accuracy in color matching and reduces costs and complexity.

Automatchic Vision is a digital spectrophotometry system, capable of correctly matching color up to three times faster than via traditional methods. These measurements are sent directly to the mixing software on the PC where they can be further assessed before mixing takes place.

Recently a new time-saving Wi-Fi functionality has been added to Automatchic Vision which enables customers to read the color at any location in the bodyshop.

Through MIXIT, an advanced go-to solution for digital formula retrieval and color matching, users have direct, immediate access to a vast database, which hosts more than two million colors and variants – with more being added every day. It uses a cloud-based system, is easily accessible from any device or platform, delivers fast and accurate search results, and is continuously being updated with new features. 

"Bodyshops across many countries are already enjoying the benefits of Colorvation, and what people really seem to appreciate is that you do not need years of experience to use it. In some cases, users report an average reduction of up to 20 percent in overall paint use after adopting Colorvation and its digital color tooling. From experience we know that once a customer has embraced this digital transformation, they immediately start to believe in it and they consider our Colorvation approach a real game changer," Tomlinson said.

Already more than 30 percent of AkzoNobel customers in North America are working digitally using Automatchic Vision and associated systems, striving for the goal of non-reliance on color documentation. According to many customers in this region, superior results have been achieved using the combination of our Automatchic Vision, formula database and proven preparation process.

"Colorvation is exclusive to AkzoNobel. In the 1970s, we became the industry’s digital color tooling front runner. Since then we have remained at the leading edge and continuously reinventing for the future. As digital color is in our DNA, we are able to commit to continuously helping our customers to drive their businesses forward by guaranteeing them the digital advantage. Now and in the future," Tomlinson said.