Challenge
The group's scale and range of operations created numerous parts procurement use cases across their business. Different departments needed to source service and mechanical parts: workshops servicing their own fleet vehicles, parts advisors helping trade customers find parts over the phone, and e-commerce teams working toward a future trade portal for customer self-service.
Despite the different contexts, advisors faced the same core challenges across all use cases:
- Finding the right parts easily and accurately - requiring navigation through 30+ different software tools and EPCs for different vehicle makes
- Identifying the best supply options efficiently - needing to search their internal inventory systems and multiple partner supplier inventories to price up parts
Pricing up parts became a bottleneck that made entire service centers inefficient. The fragmented systems meant experienced advisors spent valuable time on manual tasks, creating inefficiencies and longer customer wait times that impacted revenue opportunities. These complexities also contributed to difficulties in attracting and training new staff.
Building with Infrastructure
Multiple departments across the group were exploring different technology solutions for their specific use cases, but the organization recognized that they needed a centralized parts system. The goal was to standardize parts systems company-wide and then deploy for individual use cases like workshop operations, counter sales, and future trade portal development.
Partly's infrastructure provided the building blocks to accelerate development rather than building this unified system from scratch, while maintaining full control over their system and data. With Partly, they could serve immediate internal needs while providing the foundation for expanding into other modules, like customer-facing trade portal capabilities.
Solution - Partly Workshop
The group deployed a whitelabeled version of Partly Workshop to establish their unified parts system.
Single Source of Truth was created by connecting universal parts catalog information with their existing inventory systems in one centralized platform. This gave them complete control over their parts data while providing accurate identification across all vehicle makes and immediate visibility into internal stock levels, eliminating the need to switch between multiple systems.
Enhanced Internal Buyer Experience emerged from this foundation, enabling features that gave advisors instant access to comprehensive parts data, pricing, and availability in a single interface:
- Unified language for easy part searching with standardized naming and common aliases.
- Quick Jobs automation for common service packages, drastically reducing time spent identifying individual parts.
- Intelligent supply comparison across suppliers, allowing immediate evaluation of options and pricing.
Foundation for Future Trade Portal enables the group to eventually offer external trade customers direct access to the same unified parts system for self-service ordering.
Outcome
- Successful Implementation: The group deployed a whitelabeled version of Partly Workshop across pilot locations to validate the platform's impact on advisor efficiency and quote accuracy. Initial rollout focused on proving internal workflow improvements as the foundation for broader deployment.
- Validated Business Case: Early validation demonstrated measurable improvements in advisor productivity:
This validation provided confidence to expand the platform across their network while progressing toward their external customer portal goals.- Reduced quoting time from 15 minutes to under 5 minutes per job- Improved quote accuracy through consolidated parts identification- Enhanced advisor confidence in parts selection and pricing- Established foundation for future trade portal development
Partly's team of world-class engineers and automotive veterans is on a mission to connect the world's parts. Partly provides the neutral infrastructure that connects the entire automotive supply chain, reducing friction and costs while improving operational efficiency for everyone in the ecosystem.
