SPECIALIST vehicle repair and refurbishment network Scuffs has forged an alliance with mobile dent repair expert Dent Wizard to increase its service levels to fleets in a deal worth £2.5 million. Under the new arrangement, Dent Wizard will conduct all the paintless dent removal work that comes into Scuffs centres.

Paintless dent removal (PDR) techniques mean that dents and damage the size of a football can now be removed from certain vehicle panels, helping improve vehicle residual values. In return, Dent Wizard's Telford call centre, which receives more than 300,000 retail enquiries a year, will also refer all enquiries which are unsuitable for a PDR repair to a local Scuffs centre. Before the deal, Dent Wizard had had to turn away large number of calls wanting repairs carried out that did not fit into the firm's PDR expertise.

The move is intended to help both firms increase their penetration in a market that is predicted to be worth £6.4 billion in the UK by 2002. Scuffs was co-founded by Richard Pepper, former BCH Vehicle Management chief executive. It secured venture capital worth £7.8 million last year to develop a national chain of centres and has 10 sites, with a further four planned for the first half of this year. The firm's projected turnover by the end of this year is £7 million.