AutoWares

I'm Fred Bunting. I'm the founder and chairman of the AutoWare's Group of Companies. We're located in Grand Rapids, Mic We started strictly as a warehouse distributor. We really had no interest in managing or owning company stores, but today we nearly have 160 company-owned stores. AutoWare's is 13 distribution centers across five states, along with our 157 company-owned stores that fly auto-value and b We service an additional 701 service centers, and we also service independent jobbers, about 350 of those a night. Our business p AutoWare's has always been known for having a fantastic inventory. We've always maintained a 95% s Our big challenge today isn't overnight delivery anymore. It's all about same-day parts. Everybody needs everyt Shelly had been involved with the IoT Initiative with the Alliance, and at that point in time we started to bring together what were learning there, along with some additional t We had to ret One of the ways that we addressed the same-day availability issue was to implement our PSX, w Part Smart Express is a fee-based, same-day availability service for stores that are attached to the network. Some locations may get four-time-a-day delivery. Typically, they'll get at least two. Yeah, we always can get parts overnight, but nowadays you have to get multiple parts a day. You have to separate yourself from the competition, and knowing that you're going to have the parts at a certain time every day is a great way to do that. As we speak here today, we have probably 20 vans out there being loaded during the last hour that we'll be heading out to routes that are about an hour and a half deep off of those parts that are going out will all be same-day available parts, low-popularity codes, but beginning the cars out of the bays. What's been really helpful with us is that when I call the store and we need a certain part, they always can get it for me. Even if they don't have it in their store, they get it from a different location, they get it from a different warehouse, but the key t It's very, very beneficial for our shop and for our customers. The goal today for the service center is to get the car out of the shop. Cons We know for a fact that we're getting those sales. So the next step for us was to develop a program that we call QUIC, we took all of the information that comes out of IoT and we added all of our warehouse data and all of our store data and a lot of other elements that weren't in IoT and combined it all into one huge spreadsheet so that we could make smarter stocking decisions. My favorite example is Power Steering Holes. It was a line we've never updated before and never gave much thought to when we doubled our sales. And then also Power Steering P But the other half of the scenario is not just getting the right parts in, but getting the wrong parts out. So the next piece of software that we developed is called Diet, w And what that means is every time the buying team for the warehouse cuts a PO for a vendor, we first go to our database and look for that part that doesn't have an order trigger on it anymore or they have gross overstock on it. And we buy those parts from ourselves because they're not being utilized fully in our system somewhere. And we buy on average about $20,000 a day from ourselves. And that's been huge for us. It's helped our inventories become much more efficient. It has cleaned up not having too much on the shelves in the distribution center. It has cleaned up not spending cash where we already own a part that could sell if it was in a different place. And it has really made the store managers pretty comfortable that there's an ongoing effort to make a better inventory in their locations. We're taking the stores out of the inventory business so that they can concentrate solely on sales. Our loss sale rates are down. We know for a fact that we've improved them by at least 15%. Turns are up on our stores, yet we have not decreased our inventory vol Our sales are increasing. Our inventory has not had to decrease to do that. Our turn and earn has improved on our store organization and on our warehouse organization. And the inventory is the backbone of the business and to be recognized for doing an excellent job of managing it is somet So winning the POC award is a big deal to us and I would