CIC ‘Industry Experiment’ with Opus IVS explores agreements with carriers, proper use of calibration tools

Ultimately, repairers are responsible for how a vehicle is repaired and calibrated.

That was the conclusion made by Opus IVS CEO Brian Herron during an on-stage interview with Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) Executive Director Aaron Schulenburg last month at the Collision Industry Conference (CIC) spring meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Schulenburg asked Herron to explain the difference between an identification or documentation tool and a repair decision tool.

“At the end of the day, the decision for repairing the car falls on the person repairing the car, in my opinion,” Herron said. “They should make that decision based on OEM procedures, all of the factors around them.

“The purpose behind ADAS MAP, and in my opinion, any scrubbing tools, should not be to replace the decision of a professional technician at the car using the research that’s in front of them to decide how to calibrate the car. It should be a support tool. ‘Hey, here’s a quick reference to some things you might need to look at.’”

He added that the tool could be used in discussion with carriers to say, “‘Look, we’re trying to compile a list of things that we see commonly across these cars to help them.’ But by no means should it replace a professional making that decision.”

Schulenburg followed by asking Herron if the purpose of the tool changes depending on whether it’s an insurer using it or a repairer.

“The way insurers seem to use the tool, from what I’ve seen, is some insurers request that their DRPs include the report, and if the report is in alignment with what’s on the estimate, then the discussion gets minimized,” Herron said. “The amount of paperwork, the amount of conversations, [and] disputes is reduced. However, there’s going to be times when the report doesn’t have what’s in the repair, and we address that in a few ways at Opus.”

Herron said the options are to submit a help ticket or to attach the OEM procedures when submitting claims to carriers.

“We’ll put somebody on to help you,” he said. “We get about 600 of those a month right now, 100-150 a week, where somebody just says, ‘Hey, could you add this to the report? Just do it for me. It’s going to help me out.’ The alternative, though, is to attach the OE procedures when you submit the claim to the carrier, and that’s a longer discussion like it was before the ADAS scrubbers had occurred.”

Schulenburg confirmed with Herron that one of Opus’s end-user license agreements (EULAs) states that the information the tool provides doesn’t replace following OEM repair procedures.

“It is important to set an expectation with any product you have [that] this is what the product is to be used for, and this is what it’s not to be used for,” Herron said. “What we don’t want to have is a bunch of reports just converting into repair plans without eyes on them. We’re not at a place in technology, and we won’t be, in my opinion, anytime soon, where that would change.”

Specifically, versions of the EULA have stated that “it is possible that the software may not always have full coverage for a vehicle, and it is possible for errors in results.“

In the agreement, users must “acknowledge and agree that [they] shall be fully liable for any and all decisions and actions [they] make as a result of using the software and support services under this agreement, and that any results from using the software should be checked against the OEM factory information if such results are used to determine the functionality of safety equipment on a motor vehicle.”

Herron compared the use of Opus tools to improve accuracy with how technology is used in the medical field.

“It’s almost the discussion of, ‘Can you replace the doctor with the technology?’ I don’t want to replace the doctor with the technology,” he said. “I want the doctor to use the technology to increase their accuracy and ability.”

Herron said the original problem Opus sought to solve with ADAS calibrations was “to help the estimate writer see things that maybe they were missing and bring to their attention that there’s this critical safety system that may be on this vehicle, here’s the OEM procedures.”

“We never looked at it like we’re going to tell you what to do,” Herron said. “OEM is our foundation for how a car should be fixed. It’s just kind of the easy way to go. It’s the right way, in my opinion, so we use the OEM information in that process.

“Where we were when we started is to get reimbursed for a calibration, you had to provide all the OEM procedures and prove that needed to be done. There was a process with the carrier to churn through that and figure out if they agreed. The process today can still be valid. You can still submit all that information and the justification, or if it’s on a scrubber report, which a carrier is willing to accept, then you skip that step, but the original step still does exist.”

Herron added that scrubbing tools eliminate the step of the shop having to show documentation to insurers to prove that certain calibrations are necessary per OEM procedures, but don’t replace the need to source and research OEM procedures.

“The report still includes all of those OEM procedures,” he said. “You can click on any Alldata link, and they’re all in there. You can print them out, and you can upload them into your estimatic systems. In a lot of cases, that is still occurring.”

Herron agreed with Schulenburg that, while every tool does its best to be accurate, there’s no guarantee of accuracy, so it’s essential for repairers to make sure they’re filling in the blanks.

“The biggest challenge to accuracy is around the data that the industry gets for vehicle build data,” Herron said. “There are some automakers who have very limited build data, and so the best that we can do is to read all of the service articles for one year of vehicle and the models and make it the trim combinations and then present to the repairer, these could be on the car, you need to go check.”

He added that even when OEMs supply full build data, repairers still make the final decision on what calibrations are necessary.

When asked about concerns voiced by the collision repair industry about vendors entering into mandated tool use agreements with carriers rather than directly with the repair customer, Herron said Opus should’ve done a better job of educating as it scaled its systems.

“The ADAS MAP report doesn’t mean you can’t use something else, too,” he said. “You can have your own scrubber, or you can have no scrubber. It’s where the carrier has the DRP requirement to attach that.”

Herron clarified that, in those situations, it’s optional to use other tools, but the mandated tool must be used.

“They can still use those tools and the carrier will still reimburse them if they’re using the OEM procedures as the justification for that,” he said.

When asked whether the industry should adopt these types of tools or if an opportunity for growth could only come from an insurer requiring their use, Herron responded that Opus has seen “great adoption” from its collision repair customers without any carrier engagement.

“It was those customers who were trying to get more reimbursement,” he said. “Because the problem that we were tasked to help them solve is carriers don’t want to pay for this calibration… We would be involved in these one-on-one conversations, and we would help show service procedures and things. That was seen generally as a positive for our customers to say we’re getting less pushback on the things that were previously there.”

Schulenburg followed by asking Herron why Opus couldn’t just prove the value and capability of its tools rather than having a required arrangement.

“Each company we do business with can choose how they want to have a relationship with us,” Herron said. “A carrier has maybe decided that they want to require our tool as a business tool for their DRP; it’s really their decision to do. It’s hard for me to get behind all of the factors that they may have chosen to make that decision, but we went along because we felt like our customers supported that decision.

“I understand what you’re saying, that there’s always going to be some feedback in a market, and as we do try to move things forward and push barriers, there’s always some of that friction.”

Herron said that while he passed along phone numbers to people in the insurance industry who wanted to discuss pricing agreements, Opus wasn’t part of the pricing negotiations.

Schulenburg then asked: “Do you think that there is any responsibility for downstream impacts, like short pays or denials, based on pricing structures that you may not have organized or been a part of, but that you can see how the way the B2B relationship in this industry works, that it plays a role in the challenge that the repair centers may be facing?”

“We can have a conversation about proper calibration of vehicles,” Herron responded. “I think there’s another conversation about how you measure the time and inputs it takes to do certain diagnostic jobs because it’s very complicated. There’s OE tools, there’s subscriptions, there’s training, there’s proper targeting and fixtures. We really don’t like to be a part of those conversations because… we don’t perform those.”

Herron later added that the way calibrations are conducted doesn’t always meet OEM specifications, noting there isn’t an easy way to complete such a complex task.

“What else can I say except do it the hard way? That’s all there is to it,” he said regarding proper ADAS calibrations. “This is just one of those things where the easiest way to make that better is OEM conversations because they are feeling the same pain with ADAS calibration inside of the dealerships.

“There needs to be an industry body who steps into ADAS certification for providers. I think there’s a lot of conversations around that. It’s probably not something that happens overnight… It’s not our job to monitor how these are being performed.”

He added that OEM procedures should be followed, and repairers need to be held accountable for completing them.

Images

Featured image: Society of Collision Repair Specialists (SCRS) Executive Director Aaron Schulenburg and Opus IVS CEO Brian Herron talk during an on-stage interview at the April 22, 2026, Collision Industry Conference (CIC) meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Lurah Lowery/Reparier Driven News)