Use case
Collision cycle time: where the days actually go.
Cycle time is the number your insurer scores you on, the number your customer experiences as a rental bill, and the number that decides when your money arrives. It is also the most misreported figure in a body shop, because keys-to-keys and touch time are treated as the same thing when they are not.
Keys to keys
The full span from the customer handing over the keys to the customer driving away. It contains every hour of waiting: approval, parts, sublet, queue, and the day nobody noticed the car was ready.
Touch time
Only the hours a technician is physically working the vehicle. It measures your production floor and says nothing about anything that happens off it.
Severity
The size of the repair. Comparing cycle time across two jobs or two shops without holding severity constant is where most shop reporting quietly breaks.
The trap is easy to fall into. A shop with a fast floor and a slow front office shows excellent touch time and a cycle time that is destroying its DRP scorecard. When the owner looks at a single figure, that shop believes it is efficient. When the number is broken apart, the problem stops being vague and becomes a list of specific days in specific stages.
Seven stages
Each stage has a late signal and an owner.
The four stages where collision shops lose the most days are authorization, approval and supplement, parts wait, and sublet. All four are stages where the shop is waiting on someone else, which is exactly why they go unnoticed: nobody in the building feels responsible for a day that is passing in somebody else's inbox.
Intake and authorization
Late signal: the vehicle is on site but no authorization exists, so no clock has started and no work can begin.
Owner: the front office. AI surfaces: a checked-in vehicle with no authorization after a set window, plus the missing document that is blocking it.
Teardown and estimate
Late signal: the car is apart and the estimate is still being written, or the photos exist but the file has not moved.
Owner: the estimator. AI surfaces: a teardown that finished more than a shift ago with no estimate attached to it.
Approval and supplement
Late signal: the file is open with the insurer and nothing has come back. A supplement is submitted and the shop is unsure whether it is being reviewed or has been forgotten.
Owner: the estimator and the appraiser relationship. AI surfaces: an approval pending past the shop's own threshold, and a supplement approaching a timing limit. A person still makes every call and every argument.
Parts wait
Late signal: an ordered part's ETA moves and nobody updates the promise made to the customer.
Owner: parts and the estimator. AI surfaces: a changed ETA, a part order with no tracking, and the jobs downstream of it.
Production stages
Late signal: a vehicle sits between two stages with no technician assigned, or stalls in a booth queue.
Owner: production management. AI surfaces: a job with no movement in its current stage against the shop's own norm for that stage.
Sublet
Late signal: the vehicle left the building for a sublet and nobody is tracking when it is coming back. Alignment, glass, calibration, a dealer visit for a module.
Owner: the shop's sublet coordinator. AI surfaces: a sublet that has exceeded its quoted turnaround, and the delivery date that depends on it.
QC and delivery
Late signal: the car passed QC and is sitting in the lot because nobody called the customer or the rental has to be returned first.
Owner: the front office. AI surfaces: a completed vehicle with no delivery appointment booked, which is a lost day that costs nothing to recover.
The honest limit
AI cannot build a car faster. It can stop days from disappearing.
A software layer does not refinish a panel, weld a rail, pull a frame, or perform an ADAS calibration. It does not source a part that a supplier does not have, and it does not make an appraiser work a claim any sooner. Anyone selling cycle-time software as if it shortens the physical repair is selling something that does not exist.
What it can do is attack the other half of the number. In most collision shops a meaningful share of keys-to-keys time is not repair time at all. It is a stage that went quiet, an approval nobody chased, an ETA that changed without a phone call, a sublet that overran, a finished car that nobody collected. Those days are administrative, they are recoverable without hiring a technician or buying an oven, and they are invisible in a shop that reports one number instead of seven.
Start here: pick ten closed jobs from last month and mark, for each one, how many days were spent waiting on someone outside the building. That total is the realistic ceiling for what a cycle-time system can recover.
Related: estimate automation -> supplement automation -> cycle time across multiple shops ->
Common questions
Three questions shop owners ask.
What is a good cycle time for a collision repair shop?
There is no single number that travels across shops, because cycle time moves with severity mix, parts availability, approval speed, and how much sublet a job needs. The comparison that survives is a shop against its own trend, and its sites against each other, measured on one consistent definition of when the clock starts and stops.
Is keys-to-keys the same as touch time?
No. Keys-to-keys includes every hour the vehicle spends waiting on an approval, a part, a sublet, or a queue. Touch time counts only the hours a technician works the vehicle. A shop can run strong touch time and poor cycle time at once, and when it does, the delay is almost never on the production floor.
Can AI reduce collision cycle time?
Not by repairing faster. It cannot refinish, weld, or calibrate, and it cannot move an appraiser. It can remove the days lost to waiting and to nobody noticing: a stage gone quiet, an approval still pending, a moved ETA, a sublet holding the job. Those are administrative days, and they are usually the biggest recoverable block in a shop.
Seven stages, one number
Find the days that were never repair time.
We will stage out your last month of collision jobs and show you where the waiting actually accumulated.