Breaking Supplier Capture and Creating a Replicable Competitive Model 

1. The Problem:

• ICBC was spending > CAD 1 billion per year on claims-related services (accident repair / bodyshop work + replacement-vehicle rental).  
• The bodyshop market was almost entirely controlled by members of the Automotive Retailers Association (ARA), resulting in limited competition, high prices and significant supplier capture.  
• The smaller replacement-vehicle (courtesy-car) rental category exhibited the same pattern of incumbency and cost escalation.  
• No formal procurement function existed for these categories; spend was managed reactively by Operations with little strategic oversight.  

2. What I Was Hired to Do

Provide independent, board-level strategic advice on the entire claims supply chain: 

• Map the current state  

• Quantify the savings opportunity  

• Recommend a transformation roadmap  

• Design a new go-to-market model that could be accepted by the Executive and Board and then rolled out enterprise-wide.  

The brief was explicitly strategic and diagnostic, not operational tender execution.  

3. What I Did

• Ran a full diagnostic across accident repair material damage spend (supplier interviews, benchmarking, risk assessment etc).  

• Quantified a realistic annual recoverable opportunity of > CAD $30 million.  

• Designed a new sourcing process built on transparent governance, outcome-based KPIs and Province wide access for SME’s.  

• Produced a board paper with detailed current-state → future-state model, phased implementation plan and full business case.  

• Personally presented the paper to the Executive Leadership Team.  

4. Immediate Outcome

The Board accepted the recommendations in full and embedded the transformation programme into their corporate business plan. The first category taken to market under the new model was replacement-vehicle rental:  

• I designed the competitive tender process for the client to implement.

• The result was multi-million CAD recurring annual savings (seven-figure) and a substantial improvement in service levels and claimant satisfaction.  

5. What the Client Did Next – Lasting Institutional Change

The client’s senior leadership judged the rental tender such a clear success that they adopted my model as the official template for the much larger and more politically sensitive accident-repair (bodyshop) claims re-procurement programme that followed. Over the next several years client used this template to: 

• Open the bodyshop panel to new and regional providers  

• Dramatically reduce the historic pricing power and market capture previously enjoyed by ARA members  

• Introduce genuine, sustained competition into a CAD 1bn+ annual category  

• Deliver tens of millions of dollars in additional sustained savings across the overall claim’s portfolio.  

In effect, a single strategic assignment in created the repeatable methodology that transformed competitive tension in the client’s entire claims supply chain for the following decade.