The Automotive Aftermarket needs to get on board

What is virtual warehousing, and should I care less about another buzz word? The answer, according to Klarius is very much, that you should, as the owner and operator of the largest dedicated automotive stock holding and distribution centre for automotive emission control products in Europe, the company knows a thing or two about how to manage stock efficiently, and they are sharing.

Charles Greaves has been Managing Director at the Staffordshire HQ for several years and shares his first-hand experience with the benefits of Virtual Warehousing.

The least desirable situation from stockists’ point of view is if you are holding local stock that includes bulky items that are slow moving  you have the worst of both worlds then; it takes up space and doesn’t provide good turnover margin. Something Klarius works extremely hard on with its stockists is to counteract this scenario by making sure stock is matched to a ‘live’ profile of national and regional sales. This means Klarius will advise on which items are the best sellers and which ones are best to keep in just-in-case, if the space is available.

When you want to offer products, but don’t have the physical space to stock them, then the only way to do this is to ship direct from the supplier or manufacturer  or to ensure a delivery happens quickly enough that it can arrive at a distribution point from the manufacturer in a matter of hours and doesn’t hold-up the delivery even when compared to being picked from local stock and delivered.

There are over 10,000 individual line items in the Klarius Products catalogue of exhausts, CATs, DPFs and mounting kits. So only Klarius keeps multiples of all those items in stock. What if space in the Klarius warehouse could be sectioned off and dedicated stock held at Klarius ready for nationwide delivery?

Turns out, it can. Klarius delivers product every day around the country and deliveries will usually land in the morning next day, even if they have only been ordered the night before. This means national stocks can be offered without distributors and stockists having to keep multiple items on the shelf.

All you need then is for companies that chose to keep their stock at Klarius to be able to see the stock on their owner order system as if it were actually on site. If the electronic ordering system works seamlessly from client to supplier, to manufacturer, then hey presto, you have a Virtual Warehouse in operation!

Charles comments, on how the practicalities have been addressed. ‘We have applied different packing procedures for some clients, using robust plastic bags and hangers, we have tagged items differently, using our client’s own data tagging and capture systems, so they get scanned in and out the same way products do back at base we even do a stock check in a way that is compliant with customers’ own systems and procedures.’

‘For all intents and purposes the stock could be in our customer’s warehouse, or ours, it physically makes no difference to the way the products are ordered and delivered, the only difference is that we have access to more stock and we take care of providing the physical shelf-space. Something we have a lot of.’

Klarius owns and operates its own large van fleet that provides logistics support across the entire UK, delivering products nation-wide and making sure they are not damaged in transit. A product that turns up with damage to it is as bad as it not turning up at all, hence, a lot of time and effort is put into making sure the product arrives at the distributor or stockist, or direct customer in pristine condition from the factory.

Downsides? ‘So far’, comments Greaves, ‘we haven’t found any, we can even store stock that we did not manufacture and cut delivery costs on that too. It all sounds great and the natural assumption is to think about where we go next, we are not aiming to become the Amazon of the automotive aftermarket, but the Virtual Warehouse concept is working very well for us and our customers right now, it’s cutting costs, reducing delivery times and removing logistics issues, which has to be a win win.’