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."