Chattanooga is about to become the gateway to eastern Tennessee for AutoBody America, a chain of 12 collision repair shops in Tennessee and Mississippi, with the opening of a company location on Shallowford Road.
Patrick Terry, vice president for shop operations, said he is bringing the collision repair company’s assembly line technique and emphasis on technology to the area.
“Chattanooga is really an underserved growth market, if you look at the number of [insurance] claims compared to the number of body shops,” Terry said.
The 20-year old body repair business is the largest in Tennessee, according to chief operating officer Will Johnston, and got that way by embracing Toyota’s lean production methods as well as customer service.
“There’s not a lower bar for auto body shops. People have grown to expect a certain degree of customer service,” Johnston said. “If customers want text message or e-mail updates, we can do that, or if they want us to leave them alone, we can do that too.”
The company purposefully moved into a building that had extra room, he said, to accommodate its launch of five to nine shops from Knoxville to North Georgia over the next several years.
“One of our goals is to be provider of choice in Tennessee,” Johnston said.
The site at 6030 Shallowford Road, which received a $250,000 renovation, was chosen for visibility in a high-traffic area, Terry added.
AutoBody America’s key to success is making the process of fixing an insured vehicle as easy as it can be for the customer, said Terry.
The company keeps insurance representatives in house, he said, and works with insurers to handle everything from the rental car to the paperwork.
But Terry is most proud of the company’s repair process, which he said mirrors the process in the factory where a vehicle is made.
“Each technician specializes in one aspect of repair,” he said. “One might make sure the sheet metal is aligned. One might take the vehicle apart.”
Technician Eric Bain has been working on cars for 26 years. Te car repair process benefits most from what AutoBody America calls “the X-ray,” he said.
In the process, each car is essentially disassembled to determine the true extent of damage. The process reduces the number of supplemental requests to insurers, and helps get cars out the door more quickly, Bain said.
“The rubber bumper is just a fascia on a lot of these cars; there can be a lot of hidden damage,” he said.
David Warrick, general manager of AutoBody’s location in Murfreesboro, said that with the production line system the company uses, it can work on roughly 25 cars at once, making about five or six repairs a day.