Steps to better integration

Oct. 8, 2019
As aftermarket suppliers, distributors and retailers increasingly digitize more of their business operations, software integration has become critical – both in terms of linking internal solutions and for communicating with and sharing data with trading partners.

As aftermarket suppliers, distributors and retailers increasingly digitize more of their business operations, software integration has become critical – both in terms of linking internal solutions and for communicating with and sharing data with trading partners.

Facilitating that level of integration often requires adoption of new solutions and platforms that can be tied to modern, real-time systems that are more advanced than the legacy technology that has traditionally been leveraged in the aftermarket.

As a result, change management can often be difficult when deploying new technology platforms, or in trying to integrate new software with existing systems.  “That’s the biggest challenge,” says Scott Roush, vice president of sales at Epicor. “It’s hard, but if they don’t make the transition, things just get worse. It’s a tough process, but once you get to the other side, it allows you to do business differently and keep up with the bigger companies.”

“The biggest barrier is often fear,” adds John Sinclair, vice president of e-commerce at GCommerce. “They are often scared of what they don’t know. We try to help them understand, so they can make a better-educated decision when they are entering new digital channels.”

It’s very difficult to integrate older solutions (particular old green screen systems) with modern inventory and e-commerce platforms that require real-time interactions, however. “As the world continues to move to more e-commerce centric solutions, companies with legacy solutions are gong to struggle with full integration and real-time inventory,” says Andrew Rosen, director of strategic growth and development at Fuse5 Automotive Software. “The era of nightly feeds is over, because if you are not synched, you start getting out of stocks and you lose sales.”

Aging systems complicate integration
While legacy solutions can be integrated with trading partner systems and third-party solutions, many companies are still running solutions put in place in the 1990s (or even earlier). This creates additional complications when it comes to integration.

“They treat these old computer systems like they are a fine wine,” Roush says. “But they don’t get better with age. What you needed in 2001 is not what you need today at all.”

The integrations that do exist often get more complicated and difficult to support over time as well. “When someone is on a legacy system, they have a lot of integrations strung together that depend on exports to Excel or other ways of processing that their older technology wasn’t programmed to do,” says Al Neal, vice president of sales at MAM Software. “They may have multiple systems in place to fill gaps in these older solutions as well.”

Older legacy and homegrown systems are more difficult to keep up to date with modern functionality. Integrations may have been limited to the ones the legacy vendor agreed to make for the end user company, but that approach is more of a band aid. “That takes care of your immediate needs, but postpones the major decision that, at some point, you have to have adequate, up-to-date technology,” Neal says. “You can postpone it, but that makes it more difficult the longer it goes on. You have to keep revising those integrations over and over again.”

For communication and data sharing with trading partners, third-party solutions such as GCommerce have emerged that can help bridge some of these gaps.

“On the sell side, most ERP systems out there that were built many years ago are not robust enough to connect to all online sellers,” says GCommerce’s Sinclair. “What we’ve done with our Fulfillment Master product is by taking a simple integration in those ERP systems, we can give them a one-to-many connection that allows them to scale and service a large number of customers. With the integration of Fulfillment Master into our Virtual Inventory Cloud product, that gives them the ability to see more parts.”

Integration Best Practices
The vendors contacted for this story indicated there are a number of best practices when it comes to selecting new solutions and preparing for a greater degree of integration, both internally and with customers. Those include:

Deploy flexible, complete solutions: Look for a software solution or platform that can address as many of your business needs as possible. This can help streamline the number of systems you need to support, and make it easier to establish and maintain integrations with point solutions (like delivery management) and with your trading partners. It should also be easy to establish those links via existing integrations, or through APIs.

“It’s really an advantage of current-day technology that it’s much easier to integrate than it was,” Neal says.

“As long as the system meets modern requirements, we can integrate with them,” Epicor’s Roush says. “A lot of solutions like our catalog and connectivity tools were always intended to hook to other solutions, and we have done a lot of work to accommodate what our customers are using, and make it easy to bolt them together.”

“The industry standards have helped not just vertically but also horizontally with trading partners,” Neal at MAM says. “They have evolved from sending orders to providing acknowledgements, advanced shipping notices, invoices and stock availability.”

There are also options available now that can eliminate the need for on-site hardware management, thanks to hosted systems and cloud solutions. “When we introduced our hosted system, we assumed it would be for smaller customers who didn’t have IT staff,” MAM’s Neal says. “But we’ve found even large WDs are placing these systems in hosting centers and taking that responsibility off of their IT team.”

Mobility is key: Customers search for parts on their phones, and even technicians and advisors on the service drive and in the bay are using mobile devices to do parts look ups and (in some cases) ordering. “We live in a mobile-first society, so if you can’t run your business from your phone, you run into serious struggles in the aftermarket,” Rosen says. “We are starting to see that shift.”

Lean in on automation: In the aftermarket, the human touch is an important part of the supply chain in many areas, but for data management, forecasting and other activities, automation will be critical. “You want as few people touching the orders as possible, and that goes beyond efficiency and cost cutting,” Sinclair says. “Because of the service levels requirements of these online sellers, you need a fast turnaround for tracking and order updates, and that can’t be accomplished in a manual process.”

During deployment, run systems in parallel: When installing a new software platform or solution, run the new and old systems side by side until everyone is comfortable. “Some people in the aftermarket have been working on the same system for 15 or 20 years, and they have a hard time moving to a new solution,” Fuse5’s Rosen says. “If they are used to using F keys, the well-designed GUI front end isn’t going to be more efficient for them. Once they learn the new system, they can be more efficient. Running side by side gives them more training time.”

Be prepared to share more data: Data is king, and everyone in the aftermarket wants more of it. “The key s to normalize and standardize it in a form that your customers can consume,” Epicor’s Roush says. “It’s great to have all kinds of data, but if it not easily used, it won’t be used at all.”

For example, manufacturers and distributors are more easily able to share data to help reduce on-shelf inventory and its associated costs. “Nobody can afford to load up the shelf anymore,” Roush says. “Technology helps you understand what is moving in your area and helps the distributor make better buying decisions. It’s a collaborative effort. If a manufacturer is working well with a distributor on that level, they are going to buy more product.”

The value of leveraging third-party solutions that can help facilitate e-commerce and trading partner integration has also increased. “By having a solution in the middle, this streamlines the need for many point-to-point integration connections that would have to be made,” says Scott Luckett, vice president of industry strategy at GCommerce. “Without a solution in the middle, a vendor or manufacturer would have to maintain 200 connections to communicate with those customers.”

Finally, it’s critical to communicate clearly with all stakeholders about the value of these integrations and new solutions. Both your internal staff and your trading partners need to understand what it is you are trying to accomplish by integrating your software systems. “You can’t just dictate that,” Rosen says. “If you explain how it benefits them, people are more willing to be open to making that change. Lack of communication leads to resistance from any team. The better you explain it, the easier acceptance of change becomes.”

About the Author

Brian Albright

Brian Albright is a freelance journalist based in Columbus, Ohio, who has been writing about manufacturing, technology and automotive issues since 1997. As an editor with Frontline Solutions magazine, he covered the supply chain automation industry for nearly eight years, and he has been a regular contributor to both Automotive Body Repair News and Aftermarket Business World.

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