Change is always on the horizon and the last five years has been no exception. We’ve always been proud of attaching an environmental flare to our high tech services. This by itself has brought in many new customers, awards and tributes.

Elevating our companies’ OCE (overall customer experience) has always been high priority, but now with new technologies and products, we will be taking this to the next level. This will be brought on by expediting turnaround times, cycle times and working on maxing out touch times in a very in-line, stream-lined process. 

I firmly believe that UV technology (coupled with waterborne products) is going to play an increasingly larger role in the remanufacturing and refinishing of automobiles. It was within our company’s business plan to incorporate Brantford’s first dedicated traffic circle geared towards RDP (Rapid Delivery Process) encompassing Ultraviolet Technology.

This and other improvements to our infrastructure are  enabling us to process claims at the speed of light. Without question this has been an extremely rewarding process for our insurance partners, our environment and our company’s OCE program.

I look forward to 2007 as our 81st year in business as well being our 10th consecutive year as an I-CAR Gold Class Facility. The future will continue to bring new challenges, but we are ready to meet them.

Issue 1#7

I’ll be turning 65 this year. That’s my way of saying that I’ve been in the industry a long time and I’ve seen a lot of changes.

The biggest challenge on our horizon right now is converting to low VOC paint. Recently our painting and estimating staff and I had a meeting with some of the staff from DuPont to discuss this conversion process. Although a firm date hasn’t been set yet, I’m sure that we will have to convert at some point just to stay in operation. We are planning our own conversion for the Summer of 2008. That will give us enough time to research the equipment and find what suits us best.

If anything, environmental regulations are going to get stronger. My shop is located in Kenata, ON, which is west of Ottawa. It’s an environmentally sensitive area, so I’ve had a chance to see what may be up next for everyone.

We’ve had a number of different independent assessments done for environmental reasons. A company called Pynchon Environmental met with our paint manager and extensively assessed our paint department. 

We went through the inspections for Environmental 1, which was fairly simple, and Environmental 2, which is much more involved. We called in The Patterson Group for this stage, and they drilled down and ran a battery of tests to make sure we are running safely.

I won’t go into specifics, but none of this was cheap. As an industry, we do have to make that investment to stay legal, but it would be nice if we got compensated for it, either with an increase in rates or a tax break.

The past four years have been unstable for the collision repair industry; we experienced unpredictable volumes as a result of the increase in customer pay repairs due to the insurance market conditions, and also due to the increases in total losses.

While conditions have improved during the past year, we continue to change the way we do business to respond to our customers’ demands, and I feel that the age of opportunity for the collision repair industry is upon us.

The new challenges that we have and are currently encountering from increased regulatory restrictions, reduction in claims, afore mentioned increases in total losses, specialized equipment, shortage of skilled technicians, all continue to squeeze margins and make it harder to compete.

Despite these and many other challenges that we face every day, I believe that this is the best time in history for the collision repair industry, if anything; the opportunities are only getting bigger.

Adversities have never been a serious barrier to the success of the forward thinking, and customer focused operators. Rather, it propels the best to new levels by pointing us in a direction of new opportunities for growth and value creation. After all, creating value is really what our business is about.

We need to not limit ourselves, but rather we need to open our minds to see the best opportunities for our capabilities, through our relationship with our business partners we can then identify potential opportunities to create something new, better and different.   

Our obstacles are usually our best indicators of what needs to be done to get to the next level, and all those things that seem to be in our way are often the raw materials required to achieving our goals. Our own obstacles show us what needs to be done, and other peoples obstacles show us where there may be opportunity to create more value.

I’m really looking forward to 2007. 

Business-wise, we haven't really grown any...we've maintained the same size with the same two locations. With that said, we've completely reinvented ourselves by using lean manufacturing principles.

We've re-invented the way in which we handle the repair process of the car, including the administrative part. We're created an inter-dependent flow process throughout the entire organization. We've been able to reduce the amount of overhead staff that's required to run our facilities. This has helped in reducing overhead costs. This is all using lean manufacturing principles. This has just been over the last 2 years that we've done that.

We've seen tremendous results in seeing the amount of chaos and stress in the facilities by using the lean manufacturing principles.

Alberta marketplace from about 2 years ago, when the whole industry sort of took a nose dive and slowed down across Canada, it's now been about a year to a year and a half that Alberta has been backlogged anywhere from 30-90 days. There's been a huge shortage of skilled and entry-level technicians. It's driven up the cost of employees because of this.

Wages are now running out of control. Some of the initiatives we've taking on is designing training programs to get them up to speed...this is done internally and through the apprenticeship system and through using interactive-based learning.

In Alberta, we've dropped from 690 shops in the province to 430 shops in the last 5 years. At the same time, population has grown 20%. In the last year, we've gone from 537 to 465 shops. There's a huge shortage of technicians and it has a lot to do with the growth of the province. It's even worse in Alberta than anywhere else. What needs to happen in this industry is shops need to find ways to take young people and train them. Training is becoming paramount now and even more so moving forward.

We can look forward to more vehicles being totaled off. The industry needs to find ways to address the shortage of technicians. The technology on cars now is becoming more complicated. As we move into the future, we'll see a better working relationship with insurance companies and with collision repair centres, a closer, better-working relationship.

At the time I was on the cover I owned two facilities; B & B Auto Collision and Mississauga Truck and Bus (MTB). Although MTB originally grew out of B & B, in recent years the bus and heavy truck repair portion of our business had grown so much that I knew I had to pick one aspect to focus my attention on.

This awareness led to two decisions:  1) to officially change the company’s name to MTB Truck & Bus Collision Inc. & 2) to find a new “home” for MTB that accompanied the name change. We purchased a new location, built a new 60,000 square foot plant, and by September of 2005 we were ready to make the move.

I’m very proud to say that most of our staff has been with us a long time and chose to continue with our facility at the new location.

Concentrating on the bus repair and rebuilding business has turned out to be a very good decision. We’ve continued to experience significant growth in this area, and I believe that MTB is now quite probably the single biggest bus repairer in the country.

The current home of MTB boasts a custom built spray booth that is the largest in Canada at 100 feet long. We also have a “little” booth measuring 55 feet that we use for smaller vehicles. Today MTB employs about 60 people and continued growth means we are currently looking to expand our ranks by about 20 people.

Our clients come from a very wide radius around the GTA. We regularly repair and refurbish buses for cities in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Northern Ontario, and we are currently conducting some major rebuilds for the city of Calgary’s bus fleet.