How an Online Parts Ordering Solution can Help Improve Sales and Productivity

Managing Industry Growth

As the transportation and equipment industries expand partly due to the massive Infrastructure investments, such industry expansion and increase in market adds additional demands on companies in managing in their daily operations.

Challenges

One of the challenges faced by many manufacturers is how to enable their dealers and customers to conveniently order repair / after-market parts and for those orders to be processed in an efficient manner.

With increased orders comes the challenges of reviewing the accuracy of the orders, tracking inventory availability, following up with customers with updates, managing internal shipment activities and ensuring that the parts are delivered properly to the customers. Many manufacturers have good systems to track internal activities, but most do not have a good digital process to manage all the customer-facing activities.

In such cases most companies are experiencing an overflow of calls, making managing such calls difficult and potentially resulting in lost sales. This is not only time-consuming but also affects the business’s overall productivity. Another issue that manufacturers encounter is that if they have a system in place, it is not user-friendly, and not properly integrated with their internal systems.

Finding a Solution

Implementing a comprehensive Online Parts Ordering solution to automate their parts ordering processes can have a huge impact on efficiency and the dealer / customer experience. Such systems should also be flexible to meet the changing requirements of the industry and user-friendly so customers can use them instead of going back to the manual ways of ordering parts.

An online system designed to be customer-friendly will make it easy for customers to navigate and simple for them to order parts accurately 24/7. Additionally, a system designed to be flexible, meaning that it could be easily configurable to meet the specific needs of the manufacturer will be quicker to implement and will cost less than building a custom solution from scratch.

Having a system that can integrate with the manufacturer’s internal ERP system for parts inventory data is a big plus too, helping ensure the system’s available to order parts inventory is up to date and accurate. This integration with ERP parts inventory data provides better data to customers and helps them order parts with confidence that it will get delivered as needed by them.

The benefits of a comprehensive online parts ordering system are impressive and game changing especially as more and more customers are used to digital solutions Manufacturers can realize an increase in parts sales while saving a considerable amount of time spent by their staff administering parts orders through manual processes. An online system frees staff from time consuming phone calls and emails, allowing them to focus on other important tasks and increasing overall productivity.

Conclusion

An Online customer-friendly Parts Ordering System is an excellent solution for transportation and equipment companies that are looking to streamline and automate their parts ordering process to increase parts sales, raise employee productivity and improve the overall customer experience.

If exploring ways to improve your parts ordering processes makes you ask questions about what a solution could look like, have a look at Optimum's Parts Ordering solution: https://optimuminfo.com/solutions/parts-ordering