Repair network
Repair network explained: how an insurer's repair panel works
A repair network is the managed panel of approved repairers that an insurer or claims organisation uses to carry out vehicle or property repairs, operating under one set of commercial terms, technical standards and performance measures rather than being appointed claim by claim.
For insurers
See the damage before you send anyone
Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, sends the policyholder a link. They film the damage on their own phone, guided step by step, and the evidence lands with the claim.
The individual shop is the approved repairer. The network is the whole panel plus the rules, routing logic and management around it. In the US the same structure is a direct repair program, or DRP. Elsewhere you will hear panel, preferred supplier network, or simply the supply chain.
How does a repair network work?
- Recruitment and onboarding: shops are assessed on capacity, equipment, training, geography and financial stability, then contracted onto agreed terms.
- Routing: a damaged vehicle is allocated by postcode or ZIP, damage type, vehicle brand, capability and current workload.
- Estimating and authorisation: the shop writes the estimate on the insurer's platform, and it is authorised, audited, or referred to an engineer.
- Repair and monitoring: status flows back into the claim file, and mobility such as a courtesy vehicle is handled inside the same arrangement.
- Settlement and audit: the shop invoices the insurer directly, and a sample of completed repairs is re-inspected against the agreed methods.
The point of the structure is that repair capacity behaves like a managed resource with known cost and known lead time, instead of a market the handler has to negotiate with on every single file.
What a repair network is measured on
- Key to key time: from collection to return, the number that drives hire vehicle spend more than any other.
- Average repair cost: parts, paint and labour against the vehicle segment, watched alongside the repair versus total loss decision.
- Touch time: hours actually worked on the vehicle divided by the days it sat at the shop.
- Estimate accuracy: how far the final invoice moves from the authorised estimate, and how often supplements are needed.
- Rework and comeback rate: repairs returning under the guarantee.
- Customer satisfaction at the repair: the repairer is the part of the claim the customer physically experiences, so it carries more of the survey score than its share of the cycle suggests.
How much of the work runs through the network?
More than most people outside claims assume, and the network's role has grown at the staff appraiser's expense. CCC Intelligent Solutions data presented at the MSO Symposium in late 2024 showed that across the first nine months of that year, more than 45% of initial estimates on repairable US vehicles were written at direct repair shops and 25.6% came from photo or virtual estimating, while insurance staff appraisers wrote just 18%. In 2017, staff appraisers wrote more than 40%.
Two shifts sit inside that one set of numbers. The first estimate has moved out of the insurer and into the network, and a quarter of it has moved out of physical inspection altogether.
Repair network explained: a practical example
An insurer runs 240 shops covering 96% of its book within 20 miles. A hail event then drops 3,000 claims into three counties in a week, where the network has 11 shops with a combined capacity of roughly 400 vehicles a month.
Coverage was never the constraint. Concentration was. The escalation path is overflow agreements, catastrophe teams, and settling more of the small drivable damage on an estimate rather than an allocation, and that is a decision that has to be taken in week one. It usually gets taken in week four.
Where repair networks leak value
- Wrong first allocation: a vehicle sent to a shop without the brand capability or the calibration equipment, discovered after it has already been collected.
- Capacity blindness: routing on geography and rate while ignoring current work in progress, which fills the cheapest shop and starves the rest.
- Rate focus over cycle focus: two points off the labour rate is easily given back in four extra days of hire vehicle.
- Weak assessment before allocation: unclear images at notification mean the network takes in vehicles that should have been written off, and misses damage that reappears as a supplement.
- Thin performance data: measure the panel on cost alone and you get a network that is cheap per repair and expensive per claim.
Most of the avoidable cost sits before the vehicle ever reaches a shop. If the damage is understood accurately at notification, the routing decision is right the first time, and the choice between assessing from images and booking someone to attend is set out in virtual inspection versus physical inspection. The downstream cost of getting it wrong shows up in claims cycle time, and the triage decision that sets the whole route is covered in remote triage.
