INDUSTRY: Automotive Aftermarket Parts
JOHN GALT SOLUTION: Atlas Planning Platform
Results:
- Streamlined Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) delivers greater visibility and drives lower cost through inventory optimization.
- Automated planning process including automated order replenishment to distribution centers.
- Automated process orchestration to quickly identify and resolve plan irregularities.
- Price optimization to improve strategic use of inventory investment, identify opportunities, and reduce inventory carrying costs while increasing service levels.
Company
A leading provider of automotive aftermarket service parts in North America provides heavy duty trailering equipment and distribution for more than 40,000 parts to more than 30% of the U.S. trailer fleet.
The company operates distribution center space across 4 DCs, where it maintains North America's largest inventory of high-quality trailer parts, container/chassis components, and truck body parts for the transportation industry.
Challenge
The aftermarket parts distributor has a dynamic supply chain network with four distribution centers, a rapidly growing dealer network, and a massive fleet of trailers moving goods constantly across North America. The company developed a complete network of independently owned dealerships that provide both parts sales and trailer repair services, but the team struggled to maintain accurate inventory visibility. This posed a significant challenge for the company as it dealt with thousands of unique parts. In addition, the team with excessive manual processes, performing operations with a low degree of automation across the planning environment. These manual, time-consuming tasks took the focus away from the customer.
Inaccurate inventory visibility caused increased carrying costs, in addition to manual processes that made it difficult to respond to customer demands quickly and effectively, which had a negative impact on customer satisfaction.
To deliver on its promise of both exceptional customer service and parts availability across its broad geographic reach, The company identified an opportunity to modernize and transform its supply chain to improve visibility and automation, while driving greater efficiency across its product distribution centers and dedicated fleet of delivery vehicles.
Solution
The aftermarket parts distributor turned to John Galt Solutions’ Atlas Planning Platform to drive its supply chain modernization program. Inventory visibility is paramount, and Atlas’ streamlined Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) provides the company with a view of consumption, demand, and replenishment. By developing multiple inventory and service scenarios, the company understands the risks and tradeoffs associated with each plan to ensure it aligns with business goals. This helps improve product availability, increases service levels and drives down costs through optimization of fulfillment and inventory reduction.
Greater visibility into demand helps the company build strong relationships with its suppliers. A benefit of this is the opportunity for volume price discounts. At times this can require purchasing from an alternate supplier, or even an alternate location to meet the required vendor minimums for the price discount. The inventory optimization solution from John Galt Solutions enables the planners to optimize purchased quantities while balancing the actual need for more product and the various costs and network constraints – including transportation costs, storage costs, distribution center locations, and the associated network lanes.
With a holistic and strategic use of inventory investment, the team can quickly and easily identify opportunities through price analysis to determine the right-sized replenishment strategies, driving greater margin contribution.
Atlas has also allowed the team to automate routine processes and remove latency from the supply chain. This includes automated purchase orders accounting for vendor constraints that drive order replenishment to the distribution centers with little to no involvement. Automated process orchestration includes tasks such as alerts and notifications, as well as custom workflows that allow the team to quickly identify, flag, review and resolve irregularities in the plan. Now, the supply chain group is directed to which products require attention on priorities and business objective alignment.
“The advanced forecasting and process orchestration capabilities in the Atlas Planning Platform helped us move away from manual processes to better manage product lifecycles and account for customer promotions.”
