Aftermarket Parts for Dennis Eagle

Working with TVS to help them develop a way for their EPC to work with other ERP systems as well as their own, we are pleased to share this case study on how we helped Dennis Eagle provide Aftermarket Parts services to their customers via the online Electronic Parts Catalogue, creating a custom integration with supporting API's to provide real-time information on Parts (such as pricing and stock levels) all from their ERP system, which is Avante running on UniData (a Rocket MultiValue database).

Aftermarket Parts for Dennis Eagle - TVS Electronic Parts Catalogue [EPC] with Avante ERP

Dennis Eagle manufacture refuse collection vehicles. These are the products that everybody sees around the towns and villages. All over the country, collecting their household waste.

Our products are built specifically to our customer requirements. So each vehicle that goes down our production line is unique to their requirements. Thats down to a low entry cab, the body capabilities, the bin lift configuration. It's all down to what the customer wants.

I'm the central parts manager responsible for, the supply of parts globally.

It's part of our aftermarket logistics operation. And we cover markets from the US, all the way through to Australia with the ability to actually, have a full blown e-commerce website available to our dealers, allow them to have all the information they needed from stock availability through to price, where it's fitted on the vehicle.

This was all information that was available to the dealer. Web Control, were able to provide us with a integration to a electronic parts catalog.

The electronics parts catalog for the US was just standalone. It would literally was. You can identify your part. But to actually put it into a basket, involved in a manual step and that manual step with someone picking up the phone.

So what this system allowed us to do was provide a integration into Avante, via an API. And it would actually receive the order in Avante. And then we will process it step by step through to dispatching it, with the information. Regards. The courier.

So to demonstrate how the EPC interfaces with Avante. In EPC we can enter a vehicle identification number into EPC to identify parts. We can select a vehicle. And from there we can identify a part by either entering a part number.

In this case or we can search against a vehicle and identify different sections within the catalog. To identify different part numbers.

The challenges we had was, bringing together the ideas and, the processes of three different operations. You had our 3PL partner, you had Dennis Eagle IT and then you had Web Control to actually get all three parties together.

One of the things we decided on was to opt-in to have a project manager, and I thought that was probably the biggest success in the project, to actually have a project manager involved. Making sure that we were making progress.

It was a project manager provided by Web Control. We've done a lot of projects at Dennis Eagle, and when there isn't a project manager appointed, I feel the progress isn't as good as, when you do. For the purposes for a customer,

if they wish to order a part, they can do that via EPC. We can do that within the catalogue. Add it manually to an order. This then goes into a basket within the EPC. As you can view here. And you can then view that order within Avante. And you can then process the order.

So in this case the part I identified is transferred over to the orders. It's now in our Avante.

The main benefits is improving the processes and streamlining them. We don't have to look at several different systems in order to process the customer's order. So it could be looking at the, the pricing system on one system, looking at stock availability in the UK, making a phone call.

So all these processes, which are done either manually or with interception and looking at various systems and now streamlined into one system and the customer can control it from start to end without any interaction from the UK.

Without a doubt, the labor that goes into processing an order from start to end, I would say it's reduced by dramatically by probably 80%.