Activant Solutions is a premier provider of complete, advanced solutions for thousands of automotive aftermarket businesses. Click on the right to find out more about our products and customers or read below to better understand how Activant is solving the industry's challenges including why change is needed, how new technology is meeting today's challenges, as well as how our solutions fit in.
The Need for Change
Powerful forces are exerting new pressure on many aftermarket businesses—driving down revenues, eroding margins, and making company values deteriorate. Among these, three are especially significant: growing inventory obsolescence, an emerging liquidity crisis, and a rapidly shifting competitive landscape.
Growing Inventory Obsolescence
Conventional catalog management combined with poor supply chain visibility make it difficult for manufacturers to accurately target production to meet customer requirements. Parts proliferation has increased distributors' need to carry large inventories, yet lack of accurate channel information has rendered those inventories increasingly obsolete. The resulting mismatch between aftermarket supply and consumer demand reduces potential sales and slashes inventory value.
Emerging Liquidity Crisis
Many aftermarket companies face mounting pressure from banks to either rapidly improve inventory quality or drastically lower inventory valuation. As this trend continues, businesses dependent on acquisitions for continued growth will struggle to obtain financing, and manufacturers will no longer be able to offer liberal credit to customers—increasing the likelihood of bankruptcies and business failures.
Shifting Competitive Landscape
Intense competition is heightening the need for aftermarket businesses to dramatically improve efficiency in order to survive. While the industry's total dollar sales are increasing, some market segments are capturing a growing percentage of the business formerly held by other segments. This creates greater pressure on each aftermarket participant to deliver the products and services customers demand faster and more effectively…or lose competitive advantage to those who can.
To meet these challenges, leading aftermarket companies are looking beyond spot fixes that offer only incremental change and seeking powerful, innovative solutions that provide a true breakthrough in the way they do business.
New Technology for New Challenges
The automotive aftermarket is a highly complex distribution environment in which products and information do not flow back and forth in straight lines between manufacturers and consumers. Instead, they move in multiple directions on an almost continual basis, creating a matrix supply chain that is extremely difficult to manage—and can lead to waste and inefficiency on many levels.
Conventional enterprise management solutions, which automate "business as usual," have succeeded in many industries. But the automotive aftermarket clearly requires something different—a comprehensive set of tools and resources that allows companies to take their business to the next level and optimize their business practices. Forward-thinking aftermarket players are seeking to move beyond traditional and unaffordable "just-in-case" inventory models to an efficient "just-in-time" approach. Only by leveraging a powerful, closely connected network of trading partners and innovative, functionally rich solutions can the aftermarket achieve a true breakthrough and move to the next dimension.
Making the Change - INFORM, CONNECT, RESPOND
To overcome today's industry challenges, aftermarket companies are striving to transform their businesses by dramatically increasing operating efficiency, optimizing their supply chains, and developing valuable new close-to-customer services. Forward-thinking businesses are moving to Activant to meet this goal—helping them to inform their customers, connect with their customers, and respond to their customers.
Inform
"Smart" electronic catalog information and management tools that provide comprehensive parts and pricing information combined with accurate tracking capabilities in vast product databases are essential to improve productivity and margin management at key points of action, such as day-to-day counter-level and service dealer activities.
Connect
World-class connectivity and virtual trading systems with carefully integrated and controlled online access to inventories across the aftermarket allow supply chain participants to share vital information in real time—ensuring that overall sales and efficiency go up and costs go down.
Respond
Powerful enterprise management systems, electronic data compilation and analysis across program groups or customer bases, and inventory optimization solutions help companies better manage their business, maximize customer responsiveness, and deliver the best-practice service customers demand.
Information
Success Stories
Olympus Imported Parts "The Ultimate reports allow us to closely monitor monthly purchase history and initiate customer service calls to proactively service our top customers and re-activate dormant accounts."
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Olympus Imported Parts
