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Posts Tagged ‘Automotive’

Repair Pal for Repair Costing

Posted in Innovative Services, tagged on June 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Transparency Improved by Repair Pal
On many occasions in this blog we have have decried the lack of transparency in service parts and service repair operations. Recently we found an interesting web site which addresses this for the automotive repair market. It is called Repair Pal. It provides both repair costing – estimation, as well as [...]

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Items Becoming Less Serviceable

Posted in Service Parts Planning Basics, tagged , on June 16, 2009 | 1 Comment »

There is not much we own that we like better than our 24 inch iMac, but our sudden understanding of its basic un-serviceability has been a real disappointment. iMacs are not the only things getting less serviceable.
What You Learn When Your iMac Goes Down

We recently had the hard drive in our iMac go out.

Drive Reliability [...]

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The Reality of Automotive Service Parts

Posted in Basic Supply Chain Concepts, SAP, tagged , , , on May 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »

New Information
In a previous post we wrote about the inefficiency of automotive service parts networks.
http://spplan.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/auto-service-part-networks-are-a-mess/
The line of reasoning of the article was that manufacturers were unnecessarily outsourcing the management of service parts too low in the supply chain – at the dealer level and the auto service parts could be greatly improved in their management [...]

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Automotive Dealers Mostly Useless

Posted in SAP, tagged , on May 19, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Money for Nothing
The degree to which dealers are “taking it easy” is evident in the latest Consumer Reports survey where despite the overwhelming advantages of being part of a dealer network, dealers on average provide a customer experience that is 7% lower than that of independent maintenance shops. However it gets a lot worse when [...]

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Why Auto Service Part Networks Are a Mess

Posted in Enigma, Inventory Optimization, MCA, SAP, SPP, Service Parts Planning Basics, tagged , , , , , on May 16, 2009 | 7 Comments »

Big Problems in Automotive Service Networks

In our previous post we discussed the problems with how automotive service parts websites are dominated by dealers. We also discussed how this is completely inefficient and why these web sites should be centralized and either managed by the manufacturer, or simply outsourced. http://spplan.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/auto-service-parts-websites-a-problem/

However, after further research it turns out [...]

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Auto Service Parts Websites a Problem

Posted in Basic Supply Chain Concepts, SAP, Service Parts Database, tagged , , , , , on May 14, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Caught in a Time Warp

It is always amazing to come upon a technology that is so amazingly underutilized. This would be the case for service parts online databases.

The Story

We needed a door handle assembly part for a 1997 Honda Accord. First we started with eBay, which really had a pretty small inventory. We could only [...]

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