Success Story: Global 40 Auto Manufacturer

Summary

A Global 40 Auto Manufacturer deployed TrackVia across much of the US in an effort to increase the efficiency of its automobile inventory management. The results have far exceeded expectations as evidenced by the following:

• Business Impact: Substantially improved inventory workflow efficiency and 5 – 10 hours of time savings per week per region

• ROI: 2738%

• Payback: 12 days

“TrackVia is perfect. The lay-out is so intuitive and the usability is unmatched. I use the internet-style search all the time. I tried the other online databases and they just don’t compare – they are inflexible and hard to use.”
-- Charlie Antonsen, Distribution Field Representative

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Challenge

A Global 40 Auto Manufacturer, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of automobiles and replacement parts worldwide. Like most manufacturing companies, the rate of inventory turnover is important to overall financial performance. Therefore, this F100 Auto Manufacturer continually seeks to drive improvements in its inventory efficiency – especially during the recent economic downturn when abnormal inventory issues prevailed.

This manufacturer stores some of its inventory in centrally located warehouses until they are ready for shipment to dealers. Its existing method of tracking inventory status, however, posed the following challenges:

• While the automobiles are in the warehouse, third party vendors service the vehicles (ie, inbound processing, maintenance, and outbound logistics) but, for security reasons, are not allowed access to the corporate network to electronically update vehicle status – therefore, the manufacturer can only receive updates on its inventory manually

• The manufacturer’s staff requires daily access to up-to-the-minute information on the stored automobiles in order to accurately and efficiently manage the inventory workflow

• The existing data collection process – employing email and spreadsheets – was time consuming and inaccurate as data had to be manually collected from emails and input into spreadsheets

These challenges prompted Charlie Antonsen, Distribution Field Representative, to search for a current generation solution that would be inexpensive to own, simple to deploy / maintain, and easy for physically dispersed team to use.

Solution

Antonsen was already familiar with traditional databases such as MySQL and Microsoft Access and knew that those solutions are not easily or securely shared across a geographically dispersed workgroup. He turned to TrackVia which provided him with an online database that allowed his team to do the following:

• Set up the relational database, define the workflow, and import the data within one week for the Seattle facility – without help from IT or external consultants

• Augment the workflow over time to capture the condition of each automobile as it entered the warehouse and alert specific service providers as to the maintenance work required on specific vehicles

• Add databases over time that track damaged vehicles and dealers whose shipments have been placed on hold due to finance or product related issues

• Define a dashboard of views and reports that is used daily to determine current inventory levels, cars shipped, and cars awaiting shipment

• Easily expand use of the database to twelve regions throughout the US representing hundreds of thousands of records

With TrackVia, many distribution field representatives are now able to able to accurately track and manage stored inventory on a daily basis.

Benefits

Implementing TrackVia to manage its inventory workflow and communicate daily status on a nationwide basis has yielded tremendous benefits. Productivity has increased among the regional distribution teams as TrackVia has saved each of the 12 regional teams an estimated 5 – 10 hours of work per week. This time savings has created a startling ROI of 2738% and rapid payback in 13 days. There are other downstream benefits not reflected in the ROI, such as less inventory re-work and higher on-time shipment, that make TrackVia’s value proposition even stronger.

Overall, management’s ability to ensure rapid inventory turnover has improved dramatically leading to a commensurate improvement in operational and financial performance. TrackVia has been such an unqualified success that the F100 Auto Manufacturer is evaluating its use in tracking dealer hours and streamlining in-transit repairs.