Audatex — From Minutes to Milliseconds

Audatex (now part of Solera) builds the estimating software that insurance carriers and body shops across North America use to price vehicle repairs. When its core calculation engine started timing out on complex jobs, Rimar Technology was brought in — not to rewrite it, but to make it dramatically faster.

The problem

The client's estimating engine produces the vehicle-repair estimates used by body shops across North America. In the legacy ASP.NET WebForms application, running an estimate pushed the calculations through several COM+/ActiveX components, each doing part of the work and handing off to the next — and the overhead of all those inter-component round trips meant complex jobs took so long that users hit timeouts instead of getting answers.

Replacing a proven estimating platform was not an option; it had to get dramatically faster without changing its results.

What we did

Rimar analyzed where the time actually went, then replaced all of the COM+/ActiveX components involved in the calculation with a single, highly efficient PL/SQL stored procedure — eliminating the inter-component hand-offs entirely instead of optimizing them one by one. No rewrite of the application around it: same inputs, same estimates, milliseconds instead of minutes.

The outcome

• Processing time reduced from minutes to milliseconds
• An entire COM+/ActiveX component chain removed from the hot path — the calculation now runs in a single database call
• Calculations that used to time out became interactive for users
• Zero functional change: every estimate produced was identical — adopted with no retraining and no regression risk