Syncron Retail Inventory Management Ensures CLAAS Has Parts When and Where Customers Need Them
When profitability is impacted by growing seasons, inventory management is critical. Learn how CLAAS, a leading global manufacturer of agricultural equipment, uses Syncron Retail Inventory Management to make sure aftermarket parts are available when needed. CLAAS has also reduced the parts processing time by 20 percent using this Syncron solution. Parts availability and speed are driving more sales for CLAAS – and their customers are harvesting the benefits.
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Full Transcript
Why should a sales partner use the parts inventory manager?
Christian Buck, Manager, Service and Parts:
The reason a sales partner should use the parts inventory manager is clearly, he can increase his availability, so automatically, this will end up, as we believe, also end up in higher sales. Even if it is slightly, but it will end up in higher sales. And due to high margins in the spare parts business, this is super important.
We can decrease stock as such in terms of volume, but also, we can decrease depreciation by stopping wrong parts from being ordered by making people aware about substitution chains and things that can be still returned to CLAAS, but maybe not forever.
And certainly, also, which is important, at the point of sale is time savings. With the system, we can save 20%, certainly, of your time of doing the whole ordering and mass data management. Everything that it needs to run the spare parts business from that side.
What is very important, when implementing the parts inventory manager, is that the sales partners are willing to improve on the areas that the system is capable to improve. And on the other hand, we, of course, need the proper data to get the system running. Only good data on the inside will create good data on the outside. So we need proper order creations at the dealer systems to be able to load the data properly into the parts inventory manager. So, this is an important precondition to check on sales partner sides. Basically, kind of like a rollout readiness, which we need to ensure.
Johannes Kortenstedte, First Level Support:
What is good about the system, in my opinion, is its roll-out capability. Once the interface to the DMS provider is up and running, rolling out another dealer is done relatively quickly and easily. Within just a couple of weeks, the technology is in place, and you can plan and deliver training sessions. The training itself is also usually very pleasant and trouble-free.
What are your further plans with the parts inventory manager?
Andre Lockenkoetter, Head of Sales and Distribution Systems:
So, as parts inventory manager in the future we, of course, intend to roll this out further to a nearly global level. We want to increase the performance of the tools so that we, first of all, adapted more to the CLAAS needs, which is seasonality, which is a lot of slow-moving parts, which is probably quite special. A huge variety in the spare parts. And I think it is necessary to develop this further on to connect this to more data sources, to have more decision factors in the planning tools like machine population, for instance, or machine usage, so that we can adapt the seasonality better, that we predict the slow movers better than before. And we expect the forecast to be better or to improve in the future to fit even more to our needs as it is today.
What are some of the benefits of using Syncron?
Ulrich Timcke, Speaker of the Management Board:
And in general, the beauty of such a system is that it combines our ability and our going forward with the strengths of our distribution partner network. In the end, I think what will make us perform better in the future is to closer work together with our retail partners. Many of them are independent entrepreneurs, but it is very important that we work together and combine our knowledge in a more efficient way than we have done in the past.
Heiner Buschoff, Head of Spare Parts Service:
I would recommend distributors to use the parts inventory manager in any case. Also, I would argue that company owners and managers should instruct their spare parts service employees to work with the system in the long run.