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When I began my aftermarket career with AC Spark Plug in 1962, the challenge of differentiating your business typically meant developing new and better products and enhancing the power of your brand.

I moved to the distribution side of the industry in 1983 and discovered that while achieving competitive differentiation was equally important for a distributor, it had become far more complicated because of a variety of industry dynamics. It was easy to become overwhelmed by parts proliferation, increased product complexity, the advent of imports and the improved reliability of modern vehicles. The distributors, jobbers and retailers who survived--and who remain strong today--realized competitive advantage comes not simply by offering the best brands or through smart management of physical inventory, but also through the rapid exchange and analysis of information. Data has become our Holy Grail.

Good data accelerates our delivery of value to the end user. From the manufacturer who creates and deploys a service solution for a late-model application to the shop owner who promises to return the customer's vehicle by 5 p.m., the aftermarket will thrive on its ability to continuously enhance speed to market. If this industry fails to find new, better and faster ways to address market demand, we'll be handing yet another advantage to the new vehicle dealerships.

It was this realization that led the Alliance to embrace the concept of a data warehouse in 2000. Data warehousing wasn't new--it had been used with great success by catalog retailers and other distribution-intensive businesses--but the technology hadn't been utilized on more than a pilot basis within the aftermarket. In fact, it was the All Pro/ Bumper to Bumper organization, in partnership with a leading aftermarket technology provider, that raised the possibility of mining a "warehouse" of data for new insights to market behavior.

The driving force behind our data warehouse was the collective awareness among Alliance shareholders that our competitive velocity depends not only on variables we could identify and manage, but by countless others we hadn't begun to explore. As Bill Schlatterer, chairman of our IT committee, put it, "We're smart enough to ask hard questions, but there are always new questions we don't know to ask."

# posted by Medical Information : 4:24 AM