Mitchell has announced the availability of its Industry Trends Report (ITR) for the third quarter of 2013. According to the company, the latest report offers expert insight and guidance into evolving industry regulations and current events, and outlines how certain tools like Agile development and next-gen data gathering position companies at the forefront of market innovation.
In an article titled "The Auto Physical Damage Edition," Greg Horn, vice president of industry relations at Mitchell, analyzes the impact parts costs have on average severity over time. He highlights that the emphasis is too often placed on the four major cost areas – labor, parts, paint and material – which make up the average paid repairable severity. Charting the dollar spend for parts against labor types and paint and materials costs beginning in 2005, Horn found that “there was an overall decrease in average repairable severity leading into and during the recession, and a uniform increase in average paid severity afterwards.” By investigating the other components that make up the cost of an estimate, he concludes that despite the reduced number of parts per estimate, the fact that “cars have become more complex and have more painted panels, such as color-coded bumpers” is driving the increase in average repair severity for specific vehicles.
A supplemental article written by Paul Rosenstein, vice president of claims solutions at Mitchell, describes how the company will be changing claims estimating with 3-D scanning technology. His forward-looking article details Mitchell’s current efforts to build a database of clean 3-D scans of vehicles and how that information could be used in the future to innovate with physical damage claims processing.
“We can leverage the data collected to support other workflow scenarios like consumer self-service, fraud detection and deformation-based estimating,” he says.
Mitchell also offers a webinar, Industry Trends Live, on the Auto Physical Damage edition of the report. Horn will provide a deeper look into the trends, information and studies highlighted in this quarter’s ITR on Aug. 21, 2013.
More information:
To view the complete report, click here.
To sign up for the industry trends webinar, visit http://www.mitchell.com/pubs/industry-trends-live/schedule.asp
