Smart Sourcing Need-By Date

Are manual errors in setting the Customer Need-By Date (NBD) undermining your Smart Sourcing effectiveness and costing your dealership unnecessary emergency fees?

The Smart Sourcing Need-By Date application from FDC Solutions is a critical tool designed to give your counter and shop teams the best chance possible to meet and exceed your dealer's CCPA (Commercial Claim Processing Agreement) goals. This solution injects policy compliance directly into the order entry process, boosting efficiency and protecting your profitability.

The Challenge: The Cost of Convenience

One of the most challenging obstacles in Smart Sourcing is ensuring counter and shop personnel consistently review and adjust the customer's need-by date. It's simply too easy to let same-day or next-day values automatically populate the field, triggering high-cost emergency sourcing and missing your CCPA metrics.

Our Solution: Policy-Compliant Defaults

The Smart Sourcing Need-By Date application solves this by providing intelligent, automated defaults, shifting the burden of accuracy from the employee to the system.

• Defaulted Dates. By defaulting an accurate, "most compliant case" NBD, you allow your employees to proactively ask the customer if the policy-compliant date will work for them. This moves the conversation from reactive order-taking to proactive expectation setting, letting the customer's needs dictate any necessary change.

• Flexibility and Granularity. You set exactly how many days out to offset the NBD for each circumstance. We provide the capability to create wide-ranging default policies while allowing you to focus on strategic exceptions. Date offsets can be set by store, document type, customer, or user.

• Weekends Accounted For. Our logic considers the existing Smart Sourcing calendars to ensure the presented NBD automatically accounts for non-working days, helping you avoid costly misses and ensuring realistic delivery promises.

Essential Benefits: Immediate ROI

When used effectively, the ROI for the Smart Sourcing Need-By Date application is achieved immediately in two key areas.

• Lower Emergency Fees. By aligning NBD with policy-compliant lead times, you dramatically reduce the reliance on emergency orders, cutting down on premium shipping costs.

• Increased Counter Efficiency. Automated date setting eliminates manual calculation and review steps at the counter, freeing up your parts counter personnel to focus on sales and customer service.