IT solutions are all about making a business easier to operate, sustaining the disruptive changes and trends in its industry niche, embracing the upcoming future growing simultaneously.

TecAlliance Order Manager is the largest B2B platform in independent automotive aftermarket to buy and sell parts inventories. 280+ parts manufacturers, distributors are currently connected to the marketplace reaching customers globally.

Being the automotive aftermarket expert, Order Manager team thrives to provide continuous adaption to the business needs of the customers. As an agile business unit, the team reacts to customer needs faster and develop solutions that is beneficial for the customers.

The CMD (Collaborative Managed Data) module of Order Manager, recently rolled out a ‘tailor-made’ feature that changes the way a supplier or parts manufacturer communicates with its customers. The module in general helps the parts suppliers to offer specific articles and price information to the buyers.

A commonly encountered problem by the suppliers is managing large volume of inquiries in the system. Order Manager, being the largest marketplace has thousands of buyers, wholesalers as traders connected to each single-large supplier. It’s extremely important for the traders to receive the ‘availability of inventories’ as they need to communicate back to their customers on the status, estimated delivery time etc.

A large supplier may receive up to 300,000 inquiries/month in the system which causes a slow-down of the system, risking the daily business activities. In order to control the situation, suppliers needed to temporarily restrict the traders. Sometimes, up to as many as 12 trader organizations were restricted. Indeed, this shrank the businesses from customers, leading to a bad reputation.

While the business growth is inevitable, managing the large volume of businesses becomes much more complicated. At some point, the suppliers even faced a ‘slow-down’ of ERP performance putting the system at risk. To mitigate the risks, suppliers needed to restrict the incoming inquiries or orders, exposing themselves to huge business losses.

No way, this could have been a solution to address the existing problem.

Realizing the scenario, CMD team developed an unique feature that solves the problem, without putting a supplier-trader communication and relationship at risk. Now, the suppliers have the opportunity to provide “Availability Information” in separate file format on the CMD platform, making it exceptionally easy for the suppliers to manage the large volume of inquiries. No more, the suppliers need to restrict inquiries or orders from the traders.

On the other hand, the traders can now download the availability information in a separate file or even combine it with article and/or pricing information within the template, available in different formats. This provides an opportunity to the traders as well to customize and manage according to their need.

To make this solution further accessible to every supplier, CMD allows a supplier to provide availability information to an individual or to all the traders via CMD platform, even without a complete CMD integration.

As believed and as aftermarket experts, we are continuously driving change to make the solutions adaptive, quick and easy, connecting every need of the suppliers and buyers, thriving to business growth.

For more contact: Jörg Schröder, Senior Sales Manager at TecAlliance (Joerg.Schroeder@tecalliance.net)