West Perth Panel and Paint

Bodyshop owner Carl Francesca moved to West Perth 17 years ago to a condemned property that turned out to be built some 82- years-ago.

Several parts of the shop were not to be demolished including a wall and a doorway that now stands as the entrance into the back-end of the front office and Francesca’s own work station.

The doorway stands as a reminder that you can’t just turn an older building into a bodyshop without some problems with authorities. You have to be astute and persistent to emerge from such difficulties to run a successful bodyshop.

For many the task might have been too difficult, but Francesca, owner of what is now known as West Perth Panel and Paint (WPP&P) has expanded his business and looks back on the experience with a sense of achievement.

This is also backed up by the skills of the tradesmen at WPP&P. The shop was the first shop in Australia to win gold at a World Work Skills award at Lyon, France in l994 and they have recently won the Work Skills Australia Foundation national finals with certificates of appreciation for David Francesca, panel beater and Dennis De Florenca for spray painting. David has also won the RAC Apprentice of the Year Award for panel beating.

Carl Francesca says he tries to push employees into awards programs because “I like to see things done well and that makes us more efficient”.

Francesca also has the problem of the WA disease, the bleeding of staff from the industry and an inability to recruit locally. Like other shops, WPP&P has sought outside help and recruits in the Philippines, finding tradesmen in Manila but it has also recruited English, Italian and Irish employees. Many of these have had training in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Dubai.

“I was anti this strategy because I wanted to train Australians but the overseas strategy has been successful,” he says.

Apart from his successful overseas recruitment campaigns, Francesca has prepared an 18 page estimating guide which the shop uses, based on the US Mitchell Collision Estimating and Reference Guide. He shares this estimating information with Car Craft, the WA cooperative of quality smash repairers.

As a result, the shop also participates in favourable purchasing arrangements with suppliers and is the cooperative’s biggest customer for the provision of parts. As Francesca puts it “there is no quoting school for bodyshops and the estimating guide is a good start. This is all part of the membership of the Car Craft group. I believe the networking and mentoring within Car Craft and industry participation by its members are the major benefits of being part of the group.”

WPP&P is a shop where Francesca insists on maintaining the key quality elements and he sees benchmarking as one of these. He gets benchmarking advice from Robin Taylor at Akzo Nobel together with quality assurance assistance.

The list of quality control elements includes customer feedback, a problem log with written procedures, operating procedures and corrective action requests. The shop also adheres to practices outlined in its quality policy manual to assist with internal procedures, and it conducts business management reviews with internal minutes and auditing.

With throughput of 25-30 cars a week including prestige models, the shop is busy. Many jobs come from repeat customers.

“While recommendation and repeat customers deliver a large customer base,  we do work for HBF, Lumleys, Wesfarmers, Allianz and Swan Insurance,” Francesca says. The shop has switched to waterborne paint and sources its refinish materials from PPG.