Automotive

Spare parts distribution sits somewhere between retail and manufacturing: thousands of part codes, several warehouses, hundreds of dealers and dozens of suppliers. How much of which part should sit in which warehouse, which dealer is growing in which product group, which supplier keeps its word — the answers are scattered across the ERP and missing from the reports.

One source first

In companies that have changed ERP, data is split across two systems and definitions do not agree. The first job is to bring both sources into a single validated data warehouse: product, dealer, customer, warehouse and supplier dimensions; sales, price, cost, stock and order facts. Data validation is done together with the process owners — a warehouse that does not produce the number the teams trust might as well not exist.

Then dashboards, then decisions

Sales, product, dealer, stock, warehouse fill rate, budget and purchasing dashboards are all fed from the same warehouse. Once the dashboards have settled, the decisions follow: stock-outs and lost sales, idle stock, supplier performance, basket analysis, inter-warehouse transfers.

The team takes over

The goal is for the company’s own team to be able to sustain the warehouse and the dashboards. That is why setup runs with training and development with mentoring.