Autoparts

The Autoparts industry is an extremely competitive market especially in this economic climate where the long-term maintenance of vehicles is the only option for many private vehicle owners, as well as companies, who cannot afford to buy new.

Whether you are a warehouse distributor, wholesaler or retailer you will be finding the competition ever more cut-throat. To stay successful you need to work smarter to ensure that you have the optimal stock available to take advantage of every potential sales opportunity, but also avoid cash flow problems by overstocking.

Diver will steer you through the bottleneck of Autoparts data with dashboards and reports that automatically alert you to stock issues, highlight sales promotion results, profile your products and customers by frequency, volume and profitability of sale, and deliver a gap analysis to ensure you keep ahead of your competitors by spotting drifting customers as soon as they begin to wander.

From Dashboard overviews to the granular detail in more complex reports, Diver will help you make the correct decisions that will impact positively on your bottom-line.

Diver Platform and Diver Gateway

The Diver Platform with its latest interface Diver Gateway is flexible enough to create KPIs, dashboards, reports and Balanced Scorecards that allow you to monitor on a daily (or more frequent basis), all of the data you need to work with in your business, such as: sales by cases or items, debtor analysis and customer profiling. Diver Gateway allows you to keep up with what’s happening via mobile, tablet or PC, in depth or at an overview level, depending where you are or who is looking for the information.

In fact, if the raw data is there and you have a business rule or goal to go with it, Diver BI can deliver a means of monitoring any measure that you care to invent for your organisation.

Business Intelligence Insights for Autoparts

As well as the general insights for wholesale, retail and distributor, you will want to know things like:

• How much of my stock is near obsolete and how much do I need to keep?
• Can I trade back some of my old stock by leveraging my suppliers?
• Are some customers only buying items that I have exclusivity on?
• How much discount can I afford to keep my fleet and garage customers from straying?
• Can I afford to give more in credit terms?
• Am I able to sell generic equivalents of branded items at a better margin?
• Am I losing sales because of delivery lead times from manufacturers?
• Which of my sales team are making me the most margin?
• Am I immediately aware if items are being sold at below the suggested margin?
• What are driver items and what are filler items?
• Should I create special offers on driver items to boost sales of filler items long term?
• Are all my outlets performing in the same or different ways?
• Can I offer on-line incentives to order from my company but deliver direct from manufacturers to keep my stock levels and costs lower?

In addition Diver provides the basics like trading period comparisons of:

• Sales by value
• Sales by volume
• Margins by product, category, department, store
• Top products
• Bottom Products
• ABC analysis of sales & products
• Sales by category and department
• Sales by operator/FTE/Sales Rep
• Cost per FTE
• Sales by supplier
• Sales by floor space
• Stock turns
• POS movements for shelf replenishment
• Sales vs projected sales or budget
• What-if scenarios

Online Trade / Retail

In addition, as well as your shop based or sales rep sales you will need to know as much information as you can gather about your customers’ online buying behaviour, in order to suggest cross-sell and up-sell items at the appropriate points of the buying process.

You will want to analyse what happens if you suggest generic products as alternatives to those selected – with lower price but higher margin for example, or products that have an affinity – like oil filters, air filters, fuel filters and oil which are often purchased together. If you are out-of-stock of a preferred item can you save the sale by providing an “as good as” substitute?

Are you able to automatically collate online and EPOS sales so that you always know your stock position?

Easy access to all of this information will help you drive how you position yourself online.