PPG Picked Our Shop. Here's Why That Matters.

In the summer of 2023, PPG sent a film crew to Carl's Collision Center to shoot a case-study video about the PPG LINQ digital ecosystem. Carl Garcia walked them through the shop, showed them the mixing room, and let them measure what the technology was actually doing for our throughput. The number they came away with was a 15% key-to-key productivity increase.

That's the headline. The part that doesn't always get said out loud is the part we want to lead with: PPG is a global coatings company, and they don't show up at average shops with a professional film crew. When a manufacturer at that scale picks a location to put on camera, they're picking a reference account. Somewhere they trust to run the equipment correctly, get measurable results, and represent the brand in the way they'd represent it themselves. They picked us.

You can watch the tour here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn2rC8p-Rpc

What is PPG LINQ?

PPG LINQ is a cloud-based platform that ties hardware, software, and services together across the refinish process. The pieces include LINQ Color software, the MagicBox shop assistant, VisualizID for color rendering, the DigiMatch spectrophotometer, and the MoonWalk automated mixing system. The whole ecosystem won the Innovation Award at Automechanika Frankfurt 2024, which is the largest automotive aftermarket trade show in the world.

We didn't adopt it because it was new. We adopted it because color identification and mixing are two of the biggest sources of hidden time loss in a body shop, and both of them respond well to being engineered instead of guessed at. Most shops still treat mixing as tribal knowledge: whoever's been doing it the longest is the one you trust. That works until that person retires, gets sick, or has a bad week. We wanted a process that didn't depend on a single set of hands.

MoonWalk: mixing as a controlled process

MoonWalk is the part of the system that gets the most attention from people touring the shop, and for good reason. It's an automated paint mixing machine that meters toner to within 0.01 of a liter and leaves less than 1% of product in the bottle when the bottle gets pulled. PPG launched it globally in 2019, and we were one of the first 20 shops in North America to install the system.

What changes when mixing is automated isn't just accuracy, although the accuracy is real. It's the ability to separate the mixing function from the painter. In a traditional setup, the painter mixes their own paint, which means every minute spent at the bench is a minute not spent in the booth. With MoonWalk in the loop, mixing becomes an automated operation. The painter shows up, picks up the can, and gets back to spraying. Multiply that across the volume Carl's Collision Center runs in a week, and you can see where the 15% comes from.

The waste reduction matters too, especially on the materials side of the business. Less than 1% residual at disposal is a number you don't hit by hand, ever.

DigiMatch: color matching without the guessing

DigiMatch is the handheld spectrophotometer that feeds the system. It reads a panel from six reflectance angles and six camera angles and pushes the data to VisualizID, which searches a digital library of more than 70,000 colors and gets updated continuously. Compare that to printed color decks, which are months out of date the moment they ship and get worn down from being thrown around the shop.

For us, the win is first-time match rate. Every color a painter has to redo is time off the floor, material burned, and a cycle-time hit that ripples into the rest of the schedule. DigiMatch doesn't eliminate redos. Nothing does. It cuts them down enough that you feel it in the weekly numbers.

What this means if you bring us a car

Whatever the job is, the color side of it is being run on equipment that PPG itself thought worth filming. That's not a marketing line, that's just what happened. The 15% key-to-key gain shows up as faster turnaround for adjusters, faster cycle time for dealer partners chasing inventory, and a finish that matches the first time on the customer's car.

Fall River, New Bedford, Newport. Same standard, same equipment philosophy, same answer when a painter asks how a color should be mixed. We're going to keep investing in the technology side of this business because it's the part that compounds. Every shop says they care about quality. We're one of the few that can show you the spectrophotometer reading.