With increasing globalization, and challenging economic environment companies all over the world are recognizing the merits in sustaining “aftermarket parts revenues”. To monetize aftermarket revenues, an OEM need to adopt digitization of not just processes but the parts catalogues, and parts change management. OEM’s in their urge to contain costs; do not invest sufficient time and efforts in designing appropriate aftermarket parts catalogue.
A good parts catalogue will not only help in optimizing the service time (as all dealers’ technicians use common presentations and are trained on same), but overall savings in parts inventory. Unwanted, obsolete or replacement parts inventory management becomes proactive and revenues of dealers and OEMs improve as cash is not locked up in inventory.
In my working at Quest Informatics, I have notices two types of reactions from OEMs. In many OEMs’ despite having sufficient data and resources to improvise the parts catalogue and parts management system, as an organization they are single mindedly focused only on new product development and hence loose the vision of revenue leakages. In other cases companies may actually lack the data needed to create a good aftermarket parts catalogue and parts management system.
Many companies adapting to e-catalogues pursue a big bang approach, wherein they completely overhaul the system. Many a times, despite heavy investment, the outcomes may be poor or unsatisfactory. At Quest Informatics, we therefore recommend an incremental progression driven approach to improve process of data assortment and development of electronic parts catalogue. The progression drive approach
consists of following stages:
Stage 1: In this phase the focus would be more on creating an electronic parts catalogue with the available data. The objective is to obtain the user adoption, concurrence for further changes. This helps in breaking down any barriers, both technological and others in an organization.
Stage 2: Second, we focus on standardizing the information show in parts catalogue. Having achieved initial adoption, the objective is to drive comprehensiveness of presentation.
Stage 3: Improvise the content of data shown by including vendor & sales special configuration details so that business information could be embedded and meaningful business intelligence could be mined.
Stage 4: Provide consultative solution to improvise the process of data structure and information flow in various systems affecting the aftermarket business. The focus is now just not satisfying solution, but optimal solution in terms of DB performance, presentation capabilities, etc.
The four stage progression driven approach ensures that the implementation of changes are well managed, outcomes are measurable and directed.
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