- System & Data Integration
Omnichannel Stock&Sellout: boosting sales through an integrated data approach
Business Area
E-commerce
Solution
System Integration
The Client
The client, established as an industry leader, is one of the largest tire manufacturers in the world, for cars, trucks, vans, and motorcycles with a wide product range. Through its subsidiaries and production facilities, the client's tires are developed, manufactured, and marketed, earning positive reviews from even the most experienced. Constant efforts to meet consumer needs drive the company to seek technological solutions that support a cutting-edge vision in every process.
- Establishments with a global presence
- Constant innovation and product excellence for ever-improving driving experiences
The client sells through a model with distributors and retailers, so stock and sales management is particularly complex and decentralized. Following the 'centralization of EMEA warehouses in a single European hub to ensure greater efficiency, the need also arose to adopt a solution capable of ensuring greater competitiveness by lowering delivery times throughout the territory, including islands.
At the same time, the tire market has shifted from inflationary (the price of tire stock increases each year) to deflationary (the price of tire stock from the previous year falls), requiring greater flexibility and dynamism in implementing distributor stocking and purchasing strategies.
The challenge
The Italian market is a very competitive market, especially in the premium segment (SUV tires and sports cars). Some brands deliver as often as twice a day, and tire dealers and end customers are increasingly choosing based on delivery time instead of price (usually very level among brands).
The client organized its logistics to address this challenge with an ad-hoc logic for the Italian territory, while reconciling this solution with the need to have a single B2B resale portal, centralized at the EU level and managed centrally by an EMEA IT with Enterprise infrastructure.
Offer territory-specific business functionality and on the other hand hook into, without being able to make changes to, an EMEA B2B e-commerce portal with unified management and logic
The project
Mind-Mercatis designed an integrated approach to reconcile the needs for speed of delivery with the centrality of B2B digital channel management, thus providing a cohesive solution compatible with the client's enterprise needs. We positioned ourselves not as implementers but in a proactive spirit of reviewing the project as a whole.
The client launched a program to centrally collect stock (from the largest distributors and retailers) and sellout (sales) information so as to constantly monitor stock status and the progressive sales process, including timing and prices.
Alongside this program was a product delivery time brokerage engine, so that the most competitive distributor among those offering the most challenging delivery times could be calculated for each tire dealer.
With this data, it was then able to support its retailers in balancing and optimizing purchases, going on to decrease the risk of overstock and understock (lost sales opportunities).
The strategy
We implemented via integration platform iPaaS, a system capable of collecting the real-time data of distributors throughout the territory, acquiring information on the stocks and delivery times of each in different geographical areas (islands in particular are a challenge).
We have chosen a market-leading ESB iPaaS(Boomi) to exchange data in real time (REST API and SOAP) adapting to the formats and standards already exposed by business partners or, where absent, offering a simple and common standard to exchange the data.Data exchange flows with data warehouse, ERP (SAP) and logistics enable a unified system that in real time supports the entire sales flow, from ordering to invoicing, from logistics engagement to shipment status monitoring.
A highlight was thetransparent extension of EMEA e-commerce to offer "urgent" purchase capabilities with same-day delivery, thanks to integration with distributor stock information and direct delivery to tire dealers.
The results
- Increased customer sales both direct and through distributor
- The project led to the establishment of a standard for communicating with distributors via API in order to check availability and timing, as well as to send orders and receive invoices for urgent shipments.
- Overall, these actions have takenItaly from being last in Europe to becoming the best-performing country and the benchmark organizational model at the European level.
