JULY/AUGUST 2023 AFTERMARKET 13 www.aftermarketonline.net ENGIN T OIL COOLER TARGETED R COOLING NEC A S – REDUCTION OF OIL TEMPERATURE PASSION FOR TECHNOLOGY. TARGETED REDUCTION OF OIL TEMPERATURE www.ms-motorservice.com Automate invoice reconciliation Invoice reconciliation is a matching process between goods ordered, goods received and invoices. Simply put, it ensures you pay only for goods received and avoid paying for inaccurate, mis-keyed or even fraudulent invoices. Because the automotive aftermarket industry heavily relies on the shipping of parts, there is obviously a substantial number of transactions involved – meaning a greater chance for mistakes in the process. Despite its importance, 86% of small to medium-sized businesses manually reconcile invoices, leading to costly and timeconsuming errors. Automotive distributors carry tens of thousands of SKUs to meet customer needs. Because of the number of unique line items on an invoice, poor invoice processing means more errors, increased costs in addressing those errors, and lost or missing invoices hampering productivity and causing further delays. Often, documents get lost in the shuffle, which can result in paying for the wrong quantity, price or shipping costs. If reconciliation and the subsequent payment don’t happen quickly enough, the retailer can miss out on promotions and discounts for timely payments. Automated invoice reconciliation reduces or eliminates the bulk of these issues. By exchanging critical data with suppliers electronically, automotive distributors can let an automated system do the heavy lifting and manage invoice reconciliation by exception. Drive higher supplier performance Despite advances in supply chain management over the past several decades, many distributors still rely on gut feel to evaluate their suppliers’ performance. They often can’t track supplier performance relative to their expectations in areas like fill-rate and on-time shipments. The lack of consistent measurement leads to a vicious cycle of missed expectations and friction in supplier relationships. Distributors perpetually order more inventory than they need, and suppliers continuously ship less than what was ordered. If distributors aren’t measuring vendor performance and suppliers don’t understand how they’re being measured, supply chain performance will suffer. Empty shelves and missed delivery dates are nearly inevitable. Using supplier scorecards, distributors can use data rather than instinct to manage supplier performance. With this data in hand, they can understand which suppliers they should be doing more or less business with. A scorecarding effort with insightful supplier metrics can help distributors and suppliers make positive changes in their supply chain performance. In the end, when distributors and their supplier partners exchange digital transactions and item data their total supply chain costs go down while inventory performance and sales go up. While recent supply chain pressures have eased, an adaptable supply chain is more critical than ever ”
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