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Solution · Supply chainOne group stock instead of nine: transfer first, chase by date, return before the window closes
The part is next door, not on a six-week backorder
Every night robots read stock, open orders and workshop demand at all nine sites, propose a transfer before an order leaves, chase late backorders by date and keep the importer's return list ready.
Executive summary
Stop ordering from the importer what your other sites already hold, and stop missing the return window for the rest.
The design starts with a position, not a robot.
A part the group already owns reaches the workshop by courier the next day instead of in weeks on backorder, and no importer order is placed.
transfer postings and order lines in each brand's DMS; the importers' parts portals; the position and return files on SharePoint
Business problem
Parts management
A parts store serves its own workshop and counter. Its DMS shows that store's stock, orders and importer cut-off, so the adviser orders from the importer because that is what the screen offers. Groups grow by acquisition, each site keeps its habits and its safety stock, and a group parts manager, where the role exists, works from nine exports and a telephone.
Backorders hurt first. When the importer cannot supply, the line waits with a promised date that lives in the portal, not in anyone's diary. Nobody looks again until the customer calls, while the same part number may be standing at a sister site, bought for a job that never happened.
Dead stock costs most. Cancelled repair orders, changed diagnoses, superseded numbers and years of "just in case" leave every store with parts that will not sell. Most importers take some back through a programme with a window and conditions on age, packaging and supersession; the list has to be right and on time, and in nine stores it is usually neither. The CFO meets the pile once a year, as a write-down.
How it works today
- PersonEach site's parts adviser orders from the importer on that site's DMS screen; the other eight stores are not on it
- WaitingA line the importer cannot supply goes on backorder with a promised date and waits in the DMS until somebody asks
- PersonWhen the customer calls, the adviser phones the importer's desk, then two sister sites "just in case"; a transfer, if agreed, is keyed into two DMS screens
- Risk of errorParts bought for a cancelled job, or a diagnosis that changed on the ramp, stay in the bin until the stocktake, then leave as a write-down by site
- PersonBefore the return window the parts manager asks nine sites for slow-moving lists; three arrive, in three formats, the week it closes
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Behind every exception is an hour nobody logged.
- Chasing has no line in any timesheet: two desks follow up each backorder line in calls nobody records, and the customer hears the result last.
- Nine safety stocks are each reasonable alone and unreasonable together; the group holds the same slow part several times and is still short of it at the tenth place.
- Promised dates are the only dates anyone has, and nobody writes them down; a slip of a week is discovered by the customer, whose survey answer the importer pays on.
- Dead stock costs nothing until the audit, which is why it grows: cash first, then shelf space, then a write-down.
Cost of inaction
Dead stock is the row that grows by itself: every cancelled job, changed diagnosis and superseded number adds a line, and the return window is the one week a year in which the pile can shrink. Miss it, and the same parts are carried another twelve months, then written down at the audit. Nothing in the routine forces a change: backorders resolve themselves eventually, transfers happen when two advisers know each other, and a tenth site brings a tenth stock and a tenth spreadsheet.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A dealer group in Poland: three brands, nine sites with their own parts stores, three sites per brand; 21,000 active part numbers and about €2.6m of parts at cost; one DMS per brand, three importer portals, Microsoft 365 with Teams.
1,900 backorder lines a month across the nine stores; about one in six concerns a part a sister site holds above its own demand; roughly €390,000 of stock at cost has not moved in twelve months. All illustrative.
Each site orders on its own DMS screen; backorders are followed up when someone asks; transfers are agreed by phone and posted later; the slow-moving list is assembled from nine exports the week the window opens.
About seven minutes per backorder line across the parts desk and the service desk: portal check, call to the importer, call to a sister site, note on the repair order. The return list is ready after the window, or not at all.
Robots read every site's stock, orders, backorders and workshop demand each night into one group position; each new order line is checked against it and a transfer proposed where a sister site holds surplus; late backorders are chased against the promised date; every stocked line is aged nightly and the return list waits in the importer's format.
In the modelled case the seven minutes per line shrink to the exceptions worth arguing, one order line in six becomes a transfer, no promised date passes unnoticed, and the return list is a document to approve rather than a week of exports. A model, not a client's measurement.
Proposed solution
The design starts with a position, not a robot. Each night after the last importer cut-off, one robot per brand reads that brand's DMS for stock by site and bin, open orders, backorders with promised dates and workshop demand, and writes one group table to SharePoint. Beside it sit the rules the aftersales director owns: surplus per site, the minimum value worth moving, courier cost per lane, age bands and each importer's return conditions.
Transfer comes before order. Where a sister site holds the part as surplus, the requesting adviser gets a proposal as a UiPath Action Center task in Microsoft Teams: part, quantity, holding site, age on that shelf, courier cost, the importer's lead time. Accepted, the robot posts the transfer in both DMSs under one document number and cancels the importer line; declined, the order goes out with the reason logged. Backorders past their date are chased by email from the group parts mailbox, and the answer returns to the DMS line and the site's channel. The same nightly run ages every stocked line and keeps each importer's return list current. No AI is involved.
UiPath Orchestrator time triggers, queues and credential store; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook 365 and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; UiPath Action Center tasks in Microsoft Teams; Power BI as a Teams tab
The nightly read per brand, the group position and surplus rules, transfer proposals and postings, backorder matching and chase templates, ageing rules and the return file per importer, the Power BI model and the Teams tasks
Each brand's DMS through its API where the vendor offers one, otherwise through the user interface with the robot's own account; each importer's parts portal by the same route
How the automated process works
- AutomationAfter the last importer cut-off, a robot per brand reads stock by site and bin, open orders, backorders with promised dates and workshop demand, and writes the group position to SharePoint
- SystemEach new order line is checked against the position before the next cut-off: surplus at a sister site, courier cost, the importer's lead time
- PersonWhere a transfer beats the order, the site's parts adviser accepts or declines it as an Action Center task in Teams; above the value threshold the parts manager sees it too
- AutomationAccepted transfers are posted in both DMSs under one document number, the pick note goes to the sending site's channel and the importer line is cancelled; declined ones go to the importer, reason logged
- SystemEach morning open backorders are matched against the importer's status; a line past its date is chased by email from the group parts mailbox, and the answer is written to the DMS line and the site's channel
- AutomationEvery night each stocked line is aged: months without movement, cancelled repair order, superseded number, packaging flag; qualifying lines join the running return list, valued at cost per site
- PersonBefore each return window the parts manager receives the list per site as a task, keeps back what a site wants and approves the rest; the robot files the return and the Power BI tab refreshes after every run
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- The nightly read of nine stores into one position and the surplus per part and site
- Transfer proposals with courier cost and lead time, and the posting of accepted transfers
- Matching backorders to promised dates, the chase to the importer, the answer written back
- Nightly ageing of every stocked line and the return list in the importer's format
People decide
- Whether to transfer or to order: the site's parts adviser on each proposal, the parts manager above the threshold
- What is returned and what a site keeps: the parts manager, before the window
- The rules: surplus, thresholds, age bands and courier lanes stay with the aftersales director
Before and after
Systems and integrations
We do not add technology to make an architecture look serious. Every element below has a specific job in this process.
Inputs
- stock by site and bin, open orders, backorders and workshop demand from each brand's DMS
- the importers' order status and promised dates
- the surplus, ageing and return rules
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- transfer postings and order lines in each brand's DMS
- the importers' parts portals
- the position and return files on SharePoint
- Power BI semantic model
Human touchpoints: transfer and return tasks in Teams; site channels with the day's backorder answers; the group parts channel with the Power BI tab
Technologies used
one robot per brand; time triggers for the nightly read, a queue per brand for order lines; credential store, retries, run log
Achannel messages and pick notes, chase emails from the group parts mailbox, the position and return files
Atransfer proposals for parts advisers, return approval for the parts manager
Aa channel per site, the group parts channel, the Power BI tab
Agroup position, dead stock by site, backorders past date, transfers by site pair
Asystems of record for stock, orders, transfers and order status; API or export where offered, otherwise the user interface
CIllustrative economic model
What it is worth, with the arithmetic shown.
Most of the seven minutes is spent on the phone, not in the DMS: the portal check, the importer's desk, the sister site "just in case", the note on the repair order; €23 an hour is a fully loaded parts-desk cost in Poland. Every figure here is an assumption for this illustrative group, nothing was measured at a client, and the rows price released desk time, not posts removed.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- A part the group already owns reaches the workshop by courier the next day instead of in weeks on backorder, and no importer order is placed
- Promised dates are chased when they pass, not when the customer calls; the adviser passes on a date that came from the importer that morning
- The return window becomes a date in the calendar with the list valued and approved, so cash comes back off the shelf every year
- Nine safety stocks move toward one: a site can hold less of the slow lines when a transfer is a day away
The management view
- Nine stock reports become one position: what the group holds, where, how old, and what it is about to order that it already owns
- Dead stock has a value, a site and a trend, reported monthly rather than discovered at the audit
- Every transfer, chase and return carries a trail: who proposed, who decided, what was posted and when
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
An auditor should be able to reconstruct every decision.
- Each brand's robot signs in to that DMS and importer portal with its own account, limited to stock, orders, transfers and order status; secrets sit in the Orchestrator credential store and no person's login is reused
- The position carries part numbers, quantities, values, bins and order references; a repair order appears as a number only and no customer data leaves the DMS
- Robots run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud; the position, return files and Power BI model stay in the group's Microsoft 365 tenant, in a library only the parts desks and management can open
- The robot proposes and posts, a person accepts each transfer and each return, and nothing above the value threshold reaches an importer without approval; every step is logged in Orchestrator and the rules are versioned, changed only by the aftersales director's role
Why now
The rules of the parts business carry a date: Regulation (EU) No 461/2010, which covers spare parts, repair and maintenance, was extended by Regulation (EU) 2023/822 to 31 May 2028, and independent workshops are entitled by law to the same technical information as the authorised network (Supplementary Guidelines, paragraph 62, amended April 2023); the genuine part on the shelf is where the authorised workshop still wins
Around €5,100 a month of desk time goes into chasing parts the group has often already paid for once, and the cash in unsold parts compounds beside it: each window that closes without a list carries the pile for another year
Nothing in the stack is new: Orchestrator time triggers run the nightly read, Action Center tasks are completed inside Microsoft Teams, Integration Service connectors post to channels and send the chase; the custom work is the DMS and portal connection, one per brand
Relevant executive roles
Availability at first visit and the parts desk's day follow rules the director owns, not which adviser knows which colleague
Dead stock gets a value, a site and a return date, and the working capital in nine safety stocks becomes one number that moves
Nine stock files become one position, the return window becomes an approval instead of a week of exports, and the chase list has dates
Common questions and objections
Where sites share one DMS instance it does, on another screen, and the adviser has to look with a customer on the phone. The robot looks before every order line leaves, knows whether the other site needs the part and prices the courier against the importer's lead time.
They do when agreed by phone and posted later. Here the transfer is posted at cost in both DMSs under one document number, the courier is a rule per lane, and the parts manager sees count and value by site pair monthly. The alternative is buying a part the group already owns.
They are what a robot applies well: age, packaging flag, supersession, the cap tied to purchases. The list exists every night in the importer's format, so the window becomes a date to approve rather than a week to assemble.
When this is not the right solution
- A single site, or one parts store per brand: nothing to transfer, and the DMS's own ageing report with a monthly review is cheaper
- Bin quantities the shelf does not agree with: a transfer proposed against a phantom quantity makes things worse, so a stocktake comes first
- Importers without a return programme and a workshop with rare backorders: the chase alone seldom pays for a robot per brand
A question for the next management meeting
Twenty-one thousand part numbers on nine shelves: which of last month's importer orders could a sister site have filled the same day, and who owns the list the importer will accept at the next return window?
Implementation approach
What we deliver, and what we need from you to start.
We deliver
- Discovery at two sites of different brands: order routine, backorder follow-up, transfers, the last return round, a month of order lines with stock exports
- The group position and surplus rules per brand, agreed with the aftersales director
- The nightly read robots and the DMS connection per brand, transfer proposals and postings, backorder matching and chase templates
- The ageing rules and the return file per importer, the Teams tasks for proposals and return approval, the Power BI model and the group parts channel
We need from you
- Three months of order lines, backorder lines and stock exports from each site, the last return list and each importer's written return conditions
- An aftersales director as owner of the rules, a group parts manager and one parts adviser per brand for the pilot
- Robot accounts for each brand's DMS and importer portal, the group parts mailbox and Teams
Stages
Discovery
Order routine, backorder follow-up, transfers, the last return round, data quality per DMS
Design
Group position, surplus and transfer rules, thresholds, age bands, return conditions, permissions
Build
Nightly read per brand, DMS and portal connections, proposals, postings, chase, ageing, Power BI, Teams tasks
Pilot and rollout
One brand's three sites through a month and one return window, then the remaining brands site by site with hypercare
Departmental. Effort follows the number of DMSs and importer portals, whether each offers an API, the accuracy of bin quantities and how many return programmes the group works under.
Six weeks on backorder, and the same part is on a shelf at your site next door.
Send us one month of order and backorder lines and the stock export from each site. We come back with the lines a transfer would have covered, the value with no movement per site, and an estimate of the desk time released.
Find the parts your group already ownsThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
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