1991: Electronic Line Review
ELECTRONIC LINE REVIEW SYSTEM
The term “Line Review” is used to describe a product buyer’s process for determining the product assortment to be inventoried and displayed in a corporate retailing environment. As a buyer for a large corporate auto parts company that supplied products to more than 450 franchised store operators I was performing this task day in and day out as I worked through the many different lines of products for which I had the procurement and sales responsibility. The product selection process at the time used was dependent on recording manually all of the necessary information such as costs, sales rates, potential market price, etc… on a paper based spreadsheet from current and potential new suppliers.
At the time the buying group managed a parts inventory base that represented more than 85,000 different products supplied through a wide selection of suppliers. The line reviews were performed on a scheduled basis (three year intervals) as many of the large categories could take as long as six months to complete. In a competitive supplier market and in a rapidly growing vehicle service market the line review process schedule did not provide the opportunity to capture new and growing opportunities. As discussed in a previous project (VIN-tory), the ability to better define required auto parts inventories by market required that the auto parts buyers be capable of analyzing and delivering closer to market requirements then they were capable of doing at the time.
A project was initiated that its key deliverable would be to automate the buyers line review process and compress the time required to perform a line review from six months to less than six weeks. Having successfully completed and implemented the VIN-tory project, I led the electronic line review project (borrowing a great deal of knowledge gained from the program) and its implementation within a six month time frame.
In addition to the compressed time required to complete a line review, the project delivered enhancements to the VIN-tory program by identifying earlier in the product cycle up and coming product addition possibilities and more importantly it identified products that were declining in sales. The information garnered from the “Automated Line Review” process provided many ongoing enhancements to the VIN-tory project allowing for improved accuracy of localized inventories. The ability to review much quicker and on a more frequent review cycle each of the different supplier product offerings and costs led to better supplier qualifying, costing and product negotiations leading to improved sales and profitability for the corporation and its independent dealers.
The successful development and implementation of the automated line review process for the auto parts group was recognized as a competitive advantage by other non-automotive product groups. A new project was initiated and within the following year the automated line review process was adapted to fit the needs the other businesses within the company.