For many dealerships, managing “allied stock”—inventory that isn’t from the primary manufacturer—is a notoriously complex and labor-intensive process. These items often involve special scenarios and one-off requests, consuming a disproportionate amount of time and resources compared to your main inventory.
The good news is that there’s a better way. The Allied Stock Replenishment module from FDC, a key component of the ICS (Inventory Capital Solutions) Cloud, is specifically designed to bring order, efficiency, and intelligence to this chaotic process. This low-cost, high-ROI solution helps you standardize and manage your allied inventory, freeing up valuable time and capital.
Key Features That Revolutionize Allied Stock Management
The ICS Allied Stock Replenishment module puts you in control, providing a modern, web-based platform with advanced graphics to aid your decision-making. Here’s how it helps you do more with less:
- Organized Order Scheduling: The module’s advanced calendaring brings uniformity to the process. You can easily schedule orders, set policies, and place orders by specific subsets of suppliers, such as by order method or billing codes.
- Targeted Distribution Store Processing: Establish clear rules for distribution store processing based on subsets of parts and locations. This allows you to manage specific categories of items, like parts with a minimum package quantity or glass items, with ease.
- Optimize for Volume Discounts: “Terms of trade” can be established within ICS to ensure you meet minimum quantity requirements, helping you consistently secure volume discounts from various suppliers.
- Build Future Orders Efficiently: Use the future orders feature to strategically build out pallet or container orders for items you know you’ll need, improving logistics and reducing shipping costs.
- Intelligent Seasonality: The built-in seasonality features allow you to bring in stock ahead of peak seasons and sell it off by the end, preventing stockouts and avoiding excess inventory.
- Risk-Optimized Inventory: By using ICS’s proprietary risk factors and dynamic lead times, you can fine-tune your allied stock target service percentage. The module then optimizes the stock required to hit those numbers, often paying for itself through significant inventory reductions.
- Unlimited Data Customization: With unlimited custom data fields and cloud-integrated Excel templates, you can easily import and utilize supplier catalog data that typically has no place in a standard system. This gives you a comprehensive view of all your allied inventory information.
Want to learn more about ICS?
The ICS Allied Stock Replenishment module transforms a chaotic, resource-heavy process into an organized, efficient, and profitable part of your business. By standardizing and automating key functions, you can significantly reduce the time and effort spent on allied stock, freeing up your team to focus on other high-value tasks.
If your inventory planning processes are falling short of delivering optimal inventory levels, click the button below to read more about how ICS can help your company see a greater return on your inventory investment.
Go to the ICS page on our website