MylesJ
10-04-2005, 10:25 AM
Help me out here guys. I'm trying to decide if being odd man out on this topic is bad business or a good thing.
We make shop management software. Many of the shops now order parts on-line. This means that they take a job that used to take a 10 second phone call to the parts house (Hey Fred, send me everything I need to do a clutch replacement on a 1995 2.3 liter Saab non-turbo) and they do all the lookups themselves (bring up site, enter make/model/year and/or VIN, drill down to the section and then highlight the individual parts they want, review the order, approve it, and issue it).
Because this moves payroll cost from the parts house to the shop, there are individual parts suppliers that give a discount on parts that are self-ordered.
Here is my problem. A lot of the parts chains (NAPA, KSR, CC, etc) have not done this. They rely on third parties to provide access to their in house system. These guys want $100 a month and sometimes $100 a month per parts vendor that a shop orders from, to allow self-ordering. There is/was supposed to be a standard evolving through AAIA to permit shop management software to access parts suppliers. Companies that are supposed to be working on this spec are instead obstructing the completion of this project and telling us that it won't work and we should build in their proprietary access method so they can reap $100+ a month from each of our customers. In addition, the head of this approach has a bad reputation for screwing business partners whenever he sees another opportunity. Once bitten, twice shy.
So far I've been resisting but many of my competitors have caved and the push for an open standard is slowing moving forward instead of accelerating.
What would you do? Should I stick it out until the standard gets released and work with a subset of the parts suppliers in the meantime or throw in the towel? A lot of my customers are smaller shops and the couple of thousand dollars they would spend each year for online parts access means that they will still make the phone call instead and not use self-ordering, meanwhile I'm missing an item on most of the feature list compilations when people are making their buying decision.
We make shop management software. Many of the shops now order parts on-line. This means that they take a job that used to take a 10 second phone call to the parts house (Hey Fred, send me everything I need to do a clutch replacement on a 1995 2.3 liter Saab non-turbo) and they do all the lookups themselves (bring up site, enter make/model/year and/or VIN, drill down to the section and then highlight the individual parts they want, review the order, approve it, and issue it).
Because this moves payroll cost from the parts house to the shop, there are individual parts suppliers that give a discount on parts that are self-ordered.
Here is my problem. A lot of the parts chains (NAPA, KSR, CC, etc) have not done this. They rely on third parties to provide access to their in house system. These guys want $100 a month and sometimes $100 a month per parts vendor that a shop orders from, to allow self-ordering. There is/was supposed to be a standard evolving through AAIA to permit shop management software to access parts suppliers. Companies that are supposed to be working on this spec are instead obstructing the completion of this project and telling us that it won't work and we should build in their proprietary access method so they can reap $100+ a month from each of our customers. In addition, the head of this approach has a bad reputation for screwing business partners whenever he sees another opportunity. Once bitten, twice shy.
So far I've been resisting but many of my competitors have caved and the push for an open standard is slowing moving forward instead of accelerating.
What would you do? Should I stick it out until the standard gets released and work with a subset of the parts suppliers in the meantime or throw in the towel? A lot of my customers are smaller shops and the couple of thousand dollars they would spend each year for online parts access means that they will still make the phone call instead and not use self-ordering, meanwhile I'm missing an item on most of the feature list compilations when people are making their buying decision.