Kia program helps dealers lock down elusive parts

Dealership-to-dealership parts supply programs are now more important than ever to ensure parts departments get what they need to get their customers back on the road.

The pandemic-induced supply chain tangles and the microchip shortage resulted in a lack of auto parts to build new vehicles, repair damaged ones and maintain those brought into service departments. Despite signs of improvement, a shortage of some critical parts remains.

A team at Kia worked with software-as-a-service provider OEConnection to develop a system to keep parts flowing into service departments. Kia's D2D Express program locates and moves hard-to-find and sometimes back-ordered parts from one dealership to another that's in desperate need of it.

Kia launched the D2D program with OEConnection in July with 100 percent dealership enrollment. It won the automaker's Innovation Group Global Best Practice competition last year.

Greg Rivera, OEConnection's chief product officer, told Automotive News that all automakers have some way to manage back-ordered parts.

"Sometimes it is a highly integrated and automated system, and sometimes it may be a large or small team dedicated to scouring the dealer network for the back-ordered parts," Rivera said. "With Kia, we helped augment and automate their process to expand the reach and impact of their back-order fulfillment program."

The new program was designed to be easy for dealerships to use and more effective, and it was developed to improve results by leveraging national dealership stock. It also is an effort to burnish the automaker's customer service and satisfaction scores. Since the program began, emergency back-order fulfillment has increased fourfold compared with previous efforts.

Chad Huffman, parts manager for Luther Kia of Bloomington in Minnesota, is a fan of the new system.

"The D2D program works really well. I've been able to get some back-ordered parts from other dealerships that I can't get from Kia," Huffman said. "It helps relieve some of the stress from some of the vehicles and customers that are here and vice versa. We can also help other dealers in other states because we have a pretty extensive parts inventory."

The program allows a dealership to look at Kia's national parts ordering system to find where a component may exist. Kia handles the shipping costs and sends the provider dealership a bonus for its assistance worth 15 percent of the price of the part.

Huffman previously was a parts department manager at a Chevrolet dealership with a similar program. That dealership could locate excess inventory sitting on a shelf and then sell it to another dealership.

General Motors has had a similar program in place, known as Service Parts Resolved in No Time, or SPRINT, since 2005. GM spokesman Sabin Blake said it is a voluntary program for dealerships, wholesale dealers and ACDelco suppliers. The program allows GM to move special orders as quickly as possible using parts already in a dealership's parts department pipeline.

Honda has a dealership-to-dealership program to support Honda and Acura customers. The program was updated last year following the realization that supply chain issues would not end in the immediate future. According to Honda spokesman Chris Abbruzzese, the company facilitates a parts transfer when a customer's car is at the shop waiting for service. If another dealership has the needed part, Honda will reimburse that store up to 20 percent and pay for expedited shipping.

Stellantis has a dedicated cross-functional team "that meets daily in order to closely monitor all situations and apply timely solutions," spokesman Bryan Zvibleman said. The company is utilizing dealership-to-dealership and supplier-to-dealership transfers to secure needed parts.

Since Kia implemented D2D Express about seven months ago, more than 10,000 back-ordered parts orders have been filled for dealerships across the country. That means potentially about the same number of Kia customers got back on the road sooner than they would have if the service department had had to wait for the part from the factory.

Said Luther Kia's Huffman: "We're just trying to help everyone's customers get back on the road."