Two large multinational insurance companies act as the focal firms in the UK supply
chain and have historically made the buying decisions and distributed work to crash
repair centres and their suppliers. Our study excluded insurance options offered by car
manufacturers as this represents only a small section of the industry. Repairs executed
by dealerships were also excluded as they are generally franchised to repair cars of a
specific OEM, and would not normally be authorised to use parts recovered from
damaged cars. The research was conducted over a 12-month period in the UK as the RL
activities of the crash repair sector developed. The UK was selected as the RL operation
was being developed at the outset of the research which facilitated the investigation of
the new supply chain and its impact on the forward flow governance structure.