[mikeho1999]

This is absolutely true.

There is a pretty staggering difference in terms of how the different insurance companies pay out their claims -- everything from how they dictate services and hourly rates within their Direct Repair Program (DRP), and to the parent's point, where they set thresholds on the percentage of parts on a claim/repair which can be:

  * OEM (e.g. genuine parts from the auto manufacturer)
  * vs. Aftermarket (e.g. 3rd party clones)
  * vs. Remanufactured (e.g. picked up from a salvage yard)

In general, higher-end insurance companies that charge higher premiums tend to want collision repair body shops utilizing majority or even all-OEM parts, whereas other "cut rate" insurance carriers typically try and get body shops to utilize mostly or all Aftermarket parts, some of which can have very questionable reliability.

My company has many clients in the automotive and collision repair industry, and we've even built a number of parts procurement platforms for the US and Canada markets -- in one of those applications, we specifically had a module that put in the DRP part allocation requirements for each insurance carrier, and to run reports for those carriers to show body shops that were in compliance vs. out of compliance with those requirements.