Autocare 2018

Autocare 2018

Hosted by the Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association, AUTOCARE is a two-day National Convention for aftermarket parts, service and repair professionals. Held from 4-5 May 2018 at the International Convention Centre, Sydney, AUTOCARE will feature a range of world class international speakers addressing the latest developments across the constantly evolving automotive parts, service and repair sectors of the industry.

One of the workshops will be ‘You've Got to Know When to Fold 'Em’. It will be presented by John Allen, a Director of Horizon Inventory, and Cameron Dodd, the Product Development Manager at Auto Parts Group.

The automotive aftermarket is characterised by very large product ranges with lots of very slow moving parts, often with pack sizes and MOQs, and long lead times. The risk of creating obsolete stock is very high, and this is made even harder by the difficulty of making the thousands (even millions) of decisions that are needed to effectively manage product as it nears end of life, and ultimately to decide when to exit products from the product range.

To paraphrase the song, you’ve got to know when (and how) to hold ‘em. This presentation will describe a series of techniques to help manage portfolios of slow moving parts to help gently and profitably wind back stock levels as product sales decline, such as Dynamic Supply Chain Reconfiguration, cross dock optimisation, automated alternative supplier selection, rules based categorisation of products leading to the right pricing response to maximise gross margin, and automated excess re-distribution.

However ultimately you have to know when to fold ‘em, when to stop selling the product. It is important to be disciplined and clinical, and we will introduce a new approach which uses VOR data so that you can set policies like, “I don’t want to stock a product if it has more than a 60% chance of making a loss.” These innovative, world leading approaches have emerged from a partnership between the Auto Parts Group and Horizon Inventory and can take product end of life calculations and decisions to a whole new level. You don’t of course want to only recognise you have loss making stock when it is on hand. That is too late. The trump card in the pack that these new capabilities represent will enable people to avoid ordering the stock in the first place. We will also share the hard earned lessons into how to use external data most effectively, so that in the game of chance that is aftermarket inventory management, you can play a far better hand.