GCommerce Inc. announced that the volume of special order inquiries and purchase orders increased in June by 133 percent over the same period a year ago.
The GCommerce Virtual Inventory Cloud (VIC) is now serving a record number of trading partners as the monthly volume of transactions exceeded 46,000. VIC enables distributors and retailers to view the current inventory position of millions of products and transact orders in seconds without the need for complex IT integration.
“Interest in the Virtual Inventory Cloud has grown as resellers seek to increase their available product assortment and capture sales of hard-to-find factory-only products, all while avoiding the inefficient process of manually transacting factory stock checks and special orders, explained Scott Luckett, vice president for industry strategy at GCommerce. “Further, relentless SKU proliferation drives increased slow-moving items that are only available to distribution from factory inventories. The industry demands a solution that verifies factory availability and completes an electronic order cycle in seconds”.
VIC is the only real-time inventory and ordering solution that supports the Internet Parts Ordering (IPO) specification, developed by the Auto Care Association (www.autocare.org). IPO is a Web Service implementation that defines all of the elements of a B2B ordering transaction (Inquiry, Purchase Order, Confirmation, etc.). VIC connects trading partners that are on disparate technology protocols, such as EDI, IPO, FTP or Web Forms. “VIC negotiates the difference between the protocol of the buyer and the seller, effectively eliminating the technical barriers for support of special orders between suppliers and their distribution partners”, said Luckett.
“We’ve made VIC from GCommerce the preferred solution for special order connectivity among the members of the Aftermarket Auto Parts Alliance”, said Dale Hopkins, CIO at Alliance headquarters. “GCommerce continues to rapidly innovate their technology in response to the needs of Alliance shareholders and their supplier Channel Partners.”
In the last 60 days VIC has been enhanced with support for multiple versions of IPO, allowing trading partners on differing versions to transact seamlessly. In addition, VIC now supports inventory availability from multiple ship-from locations and promised ship dates defined by vendor-specific shipping calendars.
GCommerce, headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, is a leading provider of cost-effective, cloud-based technology solutions designed to streamline distribution supply operations. For more information about VIC or any of the automation solutions from GCommerce, see www.gcommerceinc.com.
Subscribe to Aftermarket Business World and receive articles like this every month….absolutely free. Click here.
