COLARVILLE, IOWA — If beta testing for the new app passes muster, users may soon junk their desktop hardware. Hopefully, in the next few months, says Andrew Rosen, vice president of marketing for Rev Parts Management Software, their cloud computing upgrade will be ready for public launch. Treated either in conjunction with the pre-existing platform or untethered from it — mobile phones, iPads, scanners, along other handheld technologies—the warehouse management system promises to accelerate productivity.
It should also boost revenue, says Rosen, who spoke by phone with Aftermarket Business World in late February.Every step along the distribution path, heightened visibility over receiving, stocking, and shipping viewed by the entire network will put more trust in the data. Anywhere under this app's flexible reporting format, sales figures and inventory assortments can be easily retrieved.
Set before their eyes, managers are free from doubt about the reliability of real-time information.
Remote access to data is nothing new acknowledges Rosen. But how Rev Parts address problem-solving with data depends on domain expertise. A domain expert himself, Rosen grew up in this industry while learning systems programming during his teenage years. Before Rev Parts, he ran a distribution center for Parts Authority for nearly three years.
Rosen describes the cloud-based app as an elemental theme of Rev Part’s vision. Packaged together, the software company is prepped for speed, agility and growth, the underpinnings to personalized customer development.
How quickly Rev Parts can upload customer specifications into functionality falls onto the need for speed. Or expressed differently, how a slow response time to a system flaw could hinder operations—the cost of doing business. Mindfulness to rapid modifications calls for agility.
Rev Part's development team listens carefully to customer feedback. No compact disks nor patches are ever needed for the cloud, explains Rosen. "When an update is pushed to the production side of the platform,' says Rosen, 'they have the new feature available the next time someone logs in."
Without revealing too much insight about the two-month-long beta test run that began in December 2019, Rosen took his customer recommendations to the backend. So far, he says, "It's been a relatively seamless transaction." Each network feature interfaces with its customer requirements.
Factored into Rev Parts brand promise is customer growth, the continuum of expanding digital tools to improve inventory management, point-of-sale, and customer relationship management. Rosen made no secret that their full enterprise resource planning feeds off Amazon Web Services.
Alongside many high-tech icons like Netflix, Rev Parts unabashedly finds AWS a perfect server host. According to The Economist magazine's April 11 technology column, next-generation mobile technology has been attracting a shift away from proprietary technology. Rosen finds that dedicated connections reliant on specialized hardware more inefficient than open-source software. The Economist also reported that decentralized architecture "enables networks that can support the 'Internet of Things'." While Rosen did not discuss 5G networks, AWS's digital backbone can help its users to scale their connectivity ambitions.
Using AWS also beats reliance on locally managed virtual private networks, says Rosen, which he alleges are vulnerable to blackouts. Recently, Rosen continued to say, a disaster at a data center triggered a "critical failure" for a parts wholesaler. That explains why Rev Parts has placed their bets on arguably the largest digital infrastructure. "We are a true cloud computing company that manages on a large scale all through AWS' servers with redundancies placed in the system. We have a 99.9 percent uptime guaranteed," says Rosen.
Whereas other software as service companies may deploy chatbox sessions or automated "customer service" reps, Rev Parts has a full team of on-call staffers. Client relationship building is "one thing that Rev Parts does well,' says Rosen, 'that our 24/7 customer support department will answer the phone any time of the day."
Continual digital activism demands more attention. By Rosen's standards, electronic cataloging language needs to become "cleaner" through the sharing of data. By product brand, the spare part lookup content for the same model can read differently. That concerns Rosen because he wants automotive repair shops and counter people to trust the online parts catalog information about what they are about to purchase. Most of the burden falls on the industry to further harmonize vehicle fitment because, in the long-run, supply chain costs will stay low. "When you're displaying consistent parts information online, you're going to increase revenue because they will trust the data more."
Anecdotally speaking, Rosen believes that industry businesses have proven their strengths in managing their inventories in the supply chain. The industry should not underestimate emerging business models or people's understanding of the digital world. Increasingly more than ever as mobility networks branch out and the way the marketplace perceives online shopper behavior, Rosen cannot ignore either. "As a whole,' he says, 'our industry does not utilize social media as strongly as they should."
Nearly every day over LinkedIn, Rev Parts posts a colorful headliner for their audience, namely aimed at the potentially frustrated warehouse manager. Direct and on point, the lead reads, "Don't go ballistic on your hardware due to crawling load speeds, the page crashes or system updates."
While Rosen refuses to comment about direct competitors, he agrees that the sellers' market is oversaturated with indistinguishable offerings. It can slip into absurdity, comments Rosen. "We live in a world where everyone on the internet says that they are self-proclaimed experts in some form. You know, the 19-year old life coach who drives a Ferrari, selling his e-book."
Asked about how to shop for a management system, Rosen encourages buyers to evaluate each candidate by the depth of their collective automotive aftermarket domain knowledge. Insightful people who have previously worked in the industry can certainly bring a competitive advantage to the development of sound architecture. He also encourages people to probe provider engagement with their customers in the entire systems building cycle.
Resisting customer participation, warns Rosen, could be a signal that the vendor has a preordained operating package. He adds, "Everything we're doing as an organization is with the mindset of developing a platform, so it has an app to scale with time and technology."
