Industry To-Do List

Any woman who juggles career demands with home and family life maintenance knows that she cannot even begin her busy day without a list of what she determined late last night to be essential tasks for today’s 24-hour session. Coming up with a realistic, achieveable set of current tasks can be a difficult process. None of us can keep up the pace of television’s hero of the hit series 24 and survive!

My personal list-making is probably much like the Herculean task facing any good body shop manager. Since none of us has yet learned to bi-locate nor freeze time, each of us must set priorities for short-term and long-term goals.

Lucky for our industry, SCRS has managed to come up with a to-do list for us for 2004. The list (detailed here on page 3) may not include everyone’s dream bullet points, but I think it is a great work in progress that we all should look at regularily during the rest of 2004.

Check out the list:

• Bellman programs (As Progressive marked the one- year anniversary of its Concierge direct repair program the industry definitely needs to evaluate the impact of the body shop’s lack of customer contact in such an intensely directed DRP.)
• Misuse of estimating data-bases (See our feature article this month.)
• Insurer intrusion into shop management
• OE shop certification programs.

INSIGHT will be doing ongoing research on the list throughout the year.

What does your task list look like for today, for this week, this year? I am sure that reading INSIGHT every month is a priority!

Be sure to take a look at these to-do lists in this month’s issue:

• CIC committees are tackling a variety of topics this year (See page 9 for a report.).
• Vincent Daviero, the new director of Northwood’s Univer-sity of the Aftermarket, is sure to be making a list.
• Shop Yellow Pages advertising is reportedly at a ten-year low. What are body shops doing to market their services? INSIGHT will certainly track this story in upcoming articles.
• Our Collision Industry, of course, continues to place generosity to worthwhile causes as a top priority (See page 15.).