Inventory Recommendations from Spreadsheet to Easy Street

One of our first clients in the Automotive Aftermarket was a manufacturer of replacement parts. They had developed their own in-house methodology for generating inventory stocking recommendations for their customers. They didn’t need us to reinvent the wheel. But, they had problems applying their methodology efficiently.

They had built their system in Microsoft Excel and it was a fairly complicated process to generate SKU-level recommendations. It required a lot of copy-paste to get the right data in the right spreadsheet cells. And the manual data input process led to frequent mistakes and frustrations. Because of this, they had 2 full-time analysts who spent almost all their time waist-deep in the spreadsheet trying to keep up with requests for data-driven recommendations.

We suggested that we take their approach and spreadsheet and convert it into a web application. This had several benefits and a rapid ROI:

Amazon.com and the Drive to Sell Aftermarket Auto Parts

By now you’ve likely heard the news that Amazon wants a big slice of the aftermarket auto parts pie, and that Amazon has already made deals with some large parts manufacturers — Federal-Mogul and Bosch being a couple of these companies. We have had over a week to digest this news; admittedly it was received with some alarm at first. After all, the thought that this online e-commerce behemoth could chew up and spit out our neighborhood parts stores was a bit shocking.

Many of us, if not nearly all of us, have purchased items from Amazon and may order from Amazon on a regular basis.