The heavy-duty truck parts aftermarket has always been tough and competitive, but in the past few years the challenges for distributors in this industry have been compounded by rising inflation, supply chain disruptions and encroachment by large non-traditional competitors such as Amazon and Google.
Today’s most urgent problems expressed by distributors include:
Fortunately, some of these issues can be mitigated to a large extent by leveraging the large volume of data that resides in your distribution management system (DMS). Recognizing this and factoring it into your strategic thinking is the first step in establishing a data-based approach to business operations and decision making.
In a recent study of the distribution market at large, 69 percent of organizations stated that they have already implemented or planned to implement data analytics in their business. It is clear that the ability to turn data into insight (and action) in real time is essential to future viability in this competitive and rapidly evolving market.
If you’re using a DMS that is well-engineered and properly deployed, you already have a solid head start in this transition, because it should have the ability to capture, process, and store every customer order, every inventory entry, and every other discrete bit of business information in real time across all your business departments and applications from sales, to warehouse management, to accounting — and connect all the dots.
