ALCAR WHEELBASE ROMANIA streamlines its distribution of automotive wheel rims by integrating Transart business applications with a portal-based B2B e-commerce platform provided by Entelion Teamshare.
ALCAR Wheelbase ROMANIA is a joint venture between ALCAR, European market leader in the alloy and steel wheel rims market, and the Romanian company Wheelbase, exclusive importer in Romania of ALCAR brands ever since 2004.ALCAR Wheelbase ROMANIA continues the nationwide import and distribution activities that Wheelbase initiated. Logistics allow the delivery of a significant amount of products within a maximum of 24 hours after ordering. Internationally, the ALCAR group has four production facilities, five trademarks (AEZ, Dotz, Dezent, Enzo and KFZ), and a European network of distribution in 14 key markets and a distribution base in the SE of Asia (Singapore).
The existing situation
ALCAR WHEELBASE ROMANIA uses Transart applications: Neomanager for commercial management, purchasing, inventory, sales, billing and all the aspects and operations of a company which one finds in accounting (receipts, payments, tracking commercial paper, buffer stocks etc.) and it uses HERMES TeleSales in order to define and apply new and more advanced trade policies both for partner relationships and for the development of their own direct distribution channel with their own field agents.
“We have worked with Transart ever since Wheelbase was founded. Neomanager 4.0 was the first management and accounting application that we used and now we use Neomanager. Ever since the beginning we have focused on our distribution activity and I can say that we are very happy with the functionalities that Neomanager 7 offers. Among the strengths of the application that we find very useful, I would like to mention the circuits and functions offered on the area of stock – purchase – sale and especially the reports that provide all the information we need to conduct our business” Mrs. Lucia Niculae, Executive manager at ALCAR WHEELBASE ROMANIA.
The challenge
With a network of over 150 partners (service stations, auto parts stores, car dealers), through which ALCAR Wheelbase ROMANIA sells its products to the whole country, the commercial department felt the need of an online, automated system to facilitate their partners unified access to the entire range of products (the catalog has over 1900 different wheel rim models), access to technical information provided by the manufacturer, secure access to prices, special offers, existing stock and the period in which the desired product can be supplied and delivered.
“Our business is seasonal, with two peak moments: one in the fall and winter and the second in spring, when car owners change their tires from summer to winter and vice versa. During these periods of time the call center department is over busy. As it is a technical business, manual offering is more difficult and time consuming. That happens because the first phase involves identifying the wheel rim model that fits the client’s car (depending on model, year of manufacturing and engine type). The second phase involves checking the availability of the desired model on our stock or with our provider. The large volume of requests that we received from our partners in the last autumn-winter season prompted us to seek solutions to simplify this process by facilitating access to an online system where partners have direct access to all the necessary information for bidding. ” Mrs. Lucia Niculae declared
Following discussions with Transart and Entelion Software and considering the support received from the supplier, the pressing need to develop the business resulted in the development of specifications for an e-commerce portal B2B (business to business) so as to meet at least the following requirements:
- To take the supplier’s product catalog with technical descriptions and equivalent on the B2B portal and make it available to dealers across the country, in a secure mode;
- To be automatically integrated with Neomanager to retrieve information on stocks and to insert orders directly launched by dealers on the B2B portal;
- To be integrated with HERMES Telesales for access to prices, for personalized offers with each partner, special offers / current promotions, recommended price for sale
The Solution we delivered
The result is a ready to use solution, where the communication between the B2B portal offered by Entelion, the system provided by Transart and the equivalent and product catalog made available by the supplier is fully automated and synchronized in real time. Here are some of the functionalities that we delivered:
- After authentication, each partner (dealer in the country) accesses personalized information: prices, inventory, special offers, maximum credit, current balance, invoices, receipts, orders,
- The information on products is taken automatically from the manufacturer in Germany and then administered from the CMS module of the e-commerce application -Teamshare;
- Regularly, the information displayed to clients is automatically taken over from the management application;
- Orders placed by partners are sent immediately in the ERP, which can turn them directly into invoices;
- Salespeople are notified for each order that dealers place and they are also given additional information about the stock – where it is not enough to deliver orders.
“We chose the B2B e-commerce solution provided by Entelion, primarily because they had already solved the challenge of integrating it with Transart’s applications, but especially because they had committed and managed to solve the problem of integrating in a very short time (<2 months) the catalog of product and equivalent that our supplier had provided and so, we could present the proposed solution at our meeting with our partners that we usually have before the opening of the spring season. ” said Mrs. Lucia Nicholas.
Benefits
Among the achieved benefits we would like to mention:
- Facilitating business communications with the dealers “connected” to the B2B e-commerce portal: technical information for tenders, orders, invoices, due payments;
- Implementation of personalized, automated trade policies, for each dealer separately
- Increased exposure of the company, brands and products in the online environment;
- Significant reduction of costs related to internal company operations tender notice and sales;
- Increased capacity to cover the target market with their products, creating the prerequisites for consistent sales growth;
- Improved supplier relationships by simplifying access to product catalog, inventory and promotions;
- Enhanced control of the level of credit for clients and tracking of accounts receivables (rapid identification of bad payers);
- Simplified and fast management of the content of the public web site and of the list of products (images, description, properties, methods of filtering, etc.), news, blogs, etc.
- Elimination of the effort of manually copying the information between the software applications, thus eliminating the possibility of human error;
- Operational and control related support for the executive management in sales thanks to an extensive set of reports specific to this activity;
“One of the first benefits that I noticed pretty quickly after retailers began working directly in B2B e-commerce portal has been the reduced occupancy by 80-90% in call center; before that a lot of time was consumed to make dozens of offers every day. Now this is much simplified, the consultation of catalogs is on-line and orders made by them go straight into Neomanager. Basically we have gained a lot, both in terms of image in the market and in terms of an improved relationship with our main supplier and with dealers in the country. Last but not least we negotiated with suppliers (Transart and Entelion) a special offer for our dealers who want to create their own online shops, e-shops connected with our B2B portal (http://dealeri.alcar- wheelbase.ro) but with the specific functionalities of an e-shop (e-commerce B2C) that directly address the end user. ” Mrs. Lucia Nicholas concluded!