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For the past several years, the automotive industry has treated Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) as a complex technical hurdle. Shop owners look at the diagnostic suites, the laser targets, the radar reflectors, and the geometric alignment requirements and think, "My team needs better technical training, and we need better equipment."
But they're diagnosing the wrong disease.
At our UAC Leadership Summit, shop owners, calibration specialists, and industry leaders gathered to unpack why ADAS repairs keep breaking down. The conclusion was that the calibration equipment wasn't the issue, and neither was the software.
What kept surfacing was the same set of management failures: no clear ownership, no documented process, no intentional staffing strategy, and no consistent approach to insurance communication. Will Johnston, president of PACE, shares his perspective on why ADAS is ultimately a management challenge—and what shops need to fix.
Let’s jump right in!
Upstream workflow and the "Friday afternoon scramble"
If we were to identify the single clearest symptom of a management failure within modern ADAS workflows, it would show up directly in your shop's cycle time. The absolute biggest drain on production isn't the physical time it takes to calibrate a camera or radar sensor. It's the timing of when that calibration requirement is actually discovered by your team.
Traditionally, diagnostics are treated as a final checkpoint—something a technician handles right before detailing the vehicle and handing the keys back to the customer. This passive workflow triggers what industry leaders call the "Friday afternoon scramble."
A vehicle travels smoothly through structural repair, body assembly, and paint, only to hit a complete standstill at the absolute end of the repair timeline because a dashboard light won't clear or a missing sensor calibration is discovered at the eleventh hour.
"Not having it [ADAS calibration requirements] as part of your repair plan is criminal if you run a body shop. It's revenue you're leaving on the table, but it's also downstream cars leaving your shop that aren't properly calibrated, because no effort was made when it wasn't identified, and it doesn't show up in a final inspection." – Will Johnston
However you look at it, it's a process design problem. In other words, your shop doesn't have a system that surfaces the requirement at the front of the repair, so it surfaces at the back instead, when there's no time left to handle it cleanly.
Solving this requires a top-down management mandate to pull diagnostics all the way upstream into the estimating and blueprinting phases.
The legacy pay model (and skills) trap
Even if you do begin identifying ADAS requirements early, your next big decision is who will perform the work and how they will be compensated. Trying to force modern electronics diagnostics into a legacy, flat-rate collision labor model inherently creates dangerous operational friction.
Will Johnston warned that the typical flat-rate incentive structure directly opposes the cautious mindset required for precision calibration:
"Taking someone out of a commission body shop structure, where their paycheck is based on how many cars they turn... but in this [ADAS calibrations], you can't skip steps. We need to be able to step back and problem-solve. If you rush to a solution, it can be very dangerous in the ADAS space, because we deal with what we call false positives." – Will Johnston
The truth is that diagnostics and electronic calibrations require a patient, analytical mindset. The person handling this work needs to be comfortable slowing down, reading detailed OEM procedures, and checking physical measurements down to the millimeter.
Will also pointed to a stat from Revv's Industry Benchmark survey, which found that 27% of ADAS jobs involve OEM procedures that have changed since the last similar repair.
That means shops cannot rely on memory or assume the process is the same as last time. Without someone on the team who lives and breathes this work, it's easy to feel confident because you have "seen one before," even when the repair may involve a different process, different problems, or different software.
Expecting someone shaped by one environment to perform consistently in the other is a role design challenge, one that requires a deliberate hiring and onboarding strategy rather than an informal hand-off.
The floor space opportunity cost: The real estate dilemma
For a shop owner, floor space is your most limited resource. This introduces a major asset allocation problem: your job is to decide how to use every single square foot of the shop to generate the highest possible return.
The dilemma with ADAS is that it's a space hog. A proper calibration bay requires a massive, completely flat, and wide-open area—often taking up the physical footprint of two or three standard repair bays. If you decide to build an in-house ADAS bay, you're essentially making a real estate choice to "evict" high-earning body work from that square footage.
Will highlighted this exact real estate conflict:
"If I'm tight on space, I've got a 5,000-square-foot body shop using every square foot to produce $45 a square foot a month. I'm not going to sacrifice three metal bays for a fully capable ADAS bay; it's just not going to make economic sense." – Will Johnston
This is where the asset allocation math gets tricky. Standard body bays are highly efficient because they stay busy all week long, consistently pumping out body work and paint labor. An ADAS bay, however, faces a tougher scheduling bottleneck.
Since calibrations happen at the very end of the repair process, these bays can sit empty on Mondays and Tuesdays, then get slammed on Thursdays and Fridays right before vehicles are due for delivery.
From an owner's perspective, having a massive chunk of your prime real estate sitting vacant 40% of the week isn't the best investment. If that space is sitting idle, its average monthly earnings drop significantly compared to traditional body bays that are constantly turning cars.
Ultimately, managing this real estate dilemma requires looking at the hard data. You must decide if sacrificing steady, predictable repair space for an inconsistent ADAS workflow actually makes financial sense for your specific case, or if it's smarter to protect your floor space by subletting that work to a mobile or specialty network.
Documentation is where a lot of ADAS repairs break down
If there's one place where management decisions have the most measurable impact on ADAS outcomes, it's documentation related to repair planning. Proper documentation protects your cash flow today and shields you from legal issues tomorrow. However, not all shops are staying on top of it.
Protecting your cash flow
When a shop waits until a vehicle is completely reassembled to handle ADAS needs, it triggers late-stage insurance supplements. This completely grinds the payment process to a halt, leaving a finished car sitting outside and trapping the shop's cash on the lot.
To prevent this, management must enforce a strict policy of front-loading paperwork during the initial teardown and blueprinting phase. Will emphasized that identifying these requirements early ensures the administrative work runs right alongside the physical repair:
"By doing it [documentation] upstream, we set the right expectations with the carrier, the customer, and your technicians for what happens with this vehicle as it comes out of reassembly into this new production stage for ADAS work." – Will Johnston
Minimizing legal liability
By the same token, flawless paperwork shields you from future legal issues. As a collision repair shop, you hold ultimate legal responsibility for the safety of the vehicle once it leaves. If a sensor fails down the road and causes an accident, a basic invoice or a simple "pass" printout will not save you in a lawsuit.
You have to train technicians to treat every digital file like a piece of evidence, capturing the exact shop conditions and OEM steps taken.
"As we train our techs, we say, 'Act like you're having to make a case to a judge with your documentation that you followed every step.' It should tell the story that you did everything required per the manufacturer, the way the manufacturer says, with the pre-setup steps to get the ride height correct, done in the right environment." – Will Johnston
Where does your shop stand?
The management stakes around ADAS are getting higher, not lower. The 2029 AEB mandate includes strong language that anyone touching a vehicle in the aftermarket is responsible for returning it to OEM-specified condition. Legal precedent already places liability with the shop that hands the car back to the customer, regardless of who performed the actual calibration.
A shop with its toe in the water on ADAS (doing some calibrations without full documentation, clear process ownership, or consistent standards) is carrying real liability with limited protection.
Start with an honest assessment of where your shop stands, not just in terms of the equipment you have, but also whether you have clear process ownership, documentation standards, the right staffing structure, and a workflow that identifies ADAS requirements at the front of the repair, not the end.
Take Revv’s ADAS Calibration Maturity Assessment to find out where your shop stands today.
