DES MOINES, Iowa —
GCommerce,
with support from Microsoft Corp., recently unveiled a new market
technology solution called the Virtual Inventory Cloud (VIC), which
provides inventory visibility and efficiency for drop ship special
orders between distributors/retailers and manufacturers/suppliers, and
is designed to work with existing special order solutions and
technologies within the automotive aftermarket.
GCommerce, a
provider of B2B solutions for the automotive aftermarket that offers
"Software as a Service" (SaaS), is using elements of cloud-based
technologies to automate procurement and purchasing for national
retailers, wholesalers, program groups and their suppliers.
“VIC enables hundreds of distributors and retailers in the automotive
aftermarket to improve margins and increase customer loyalty through
better visibility into parts availability from suppliers," said Rick
Main, executive vice president, sales and marketing, GCommerce. "The
solution opens the door to connect into capabilities that only the
largest companies could afford through heavy IT investments. This is
representative of a new transformative wave of business innovation that
extends capabilities beyond the four walls of an enterprise, enabled
through adoption of cloud platforms. The cloud will exponentially
accelerate GCommerce’s ability to serve the automotive aftermarket
market and others like it, and complements the existing technologies
and solutions.”
According to GCommerce, the automotive
aftermarket has had difficulty implementing a real-time inventory
inquiry and procurement model for drop ship special orders. With
thousands of commercial buyers, sellers and brands, the disparate
procurement and fulfillment mechanisms and protocols that are either
automated or manual are numerous. Data from GCommerce shows that the
automotive aftermarket averages hundreds of millions of transactions
traded between B2B partners per year. A large portion of the revenue
dollars in this market is for replenishment orders, but the drop ship
special orders account for more than 80 percent of the transaction
volume and cost associated in the supply chain, the company says. VIC
is designed to help reduce these costs, while driving up special order
revenue and net profitability of the transactions. Key components of
the drop ship order business include procurement, inventory management,
fulfillment and speed of response and transaction.
“Customers
are increasingly turning to cloud-based solutions for the innovation
needed in their supply chains because the centralized access to
processes and information is well-suited to the multi-enterprise nature
of today’s supply chains,” said Dennis Gaughan, vice president, AMR
Research.
Windows Azure and
Microsoft SQL Azure
enable VIC to be a more efficient trading system capable of handling
tens of millions of transactions per month for automotive part
suppliers. GCommerce’s VIC implementation with support from Microsoft
allows suppliers to create a large-scale virtual data warehouse that
reduces dependency on paper-based processes and leverages a
technology-based automation system that empowers people. This platform
has potential to transform distribution supply chain transactions and
management across numerous industries.
“As today’s
announcement demonstrates, Microsoft SQL Azure and Windows Azure enable
mission-critical enterprise processes that deliver agile, cloud-based
solutions for our partners,” said Rahul Auradkar, director of the Cloud
Services Team in the Business Platforms Division at Microsoft. “The
automotive aftermarket industry faces a large-scale, complex challenge
in implementing business processes like the real-time inventory and
procurement process for drop ship special orders. Microsoft SQL Azure
and Windows Azure deliver the agility, efficiency and scalability that
GCommerce needs to meet this challenge and transform the automotive
aftermarket supply chain.”