Inventory & Purchasing Compliance Management Software for Tire Retailers
- Company Overview
Town Fair Tire are a retail trade company is the largest tire dealer in New England with approximately 100 locations throughout the area. It also provides tire repair, tire mounting, tire balancing, wheel alignment, and tire inflation services. The company was founded in 1961.
- Why PLANERGY
Town Fair Tire uses PLANERGY to make transactions more efficient and to ensure compliance across their widely-distributed retail stores. The company relies heavily on tire orders from manufacturers arriving on time, without delays or mistakes. Having a dependable purchasing and retail order management system to track company orders is key to the success of its operations.
Key Challenges
- No automated procure-to-pay system in place
- Purchasing process consisted of Excel, email, and phone communications, resulting in higher prices, slow deliveries, and missing supplies
- No ability to track tire orders, negatively affecting customer service
- No control over local budgets, resulting in overspending
- No ability to analyze and report on spend patterns to ensure maximum efficiency with key vendors
Key Benefits
- Centralized purchasing and accounts payable in one cloud-based system, making purchase process more efficient and accessible to all 100 locations
- Greater transparency into the order process, enabling staff to provide customers with more up-to-date information about tire deliveries
- Improved compliance through customized spend limits at the local level
- More informed, data-driven budgeting with real-time reports on company performance
The Story
Customer
Multistate tire retailer
Key client
Vice President of Finance
Industry
Retail
Company Size
1,000 employees
Before PLANERGY
This retail tire dealer needed to make purchasing more efficient and cost-effective. The company was using a manual spend management system created by the finance and administrative teams over many years.
Their system consisted of keeping track of orders using Excel, sending them to various vendors and internal departments via email, and getting approvals over the telephone. With over 1,000 employees across six states, this manual system was causing more problems than solutions – local stores often went over budget or bought the wrong tires. The system was confusing, time-consuming, and difficult to control.
PLANERGY was an obvious choice for the Vice President of Finance and the Head of Administration, the two individuals charged with streamlining the purchasing process. They needed a comprehensive, yet simple procure-to-pay solution to be implemented company-wide quickly. Before they found PLANERGY, they didn’t think it was possible to find a software solution for retail businesses that could manage all of that.
The team chose PLANERGY because it could be in place across the company’s highly complex structure in a matter of weeks. On top of that, the software for this tire dealer was a great value, particularly in comparison to the ERP systems they were evaluating to manage spend and accounts payable. ERP systems in retail take months or years to implement and are ten or more times the cost.
The PLANERGY team helped the tire retailer design an approvals process for their complex organization. The workflows consisted of five levels that spanned divisions, regions, and retail stores. In addition to workflows, appropriate spend limits were set for different users at retail and wholesale locations. All workflows were set up in one week using PLANERGY’s flexible workflow management.
After PLANERGY
Training was held via twenty-minute live webinar sessions to accommodate the team’s various locations. Within a short time, 167 users across all retail stores, and wholesale, regional, and main office locations were using the system regularly.
PLANERGY enables the tire retailer to streamline the spend management process throughout the entire organization. At the same time, the workload has been democratized and the purchasing team has greater control over vendors, budgets, and reporting. By setting customized user permissions and limits, overspending has been eliminated at the local level. Individual stores appreciate the freedom they have to order what they want when they want it through PLANERGY.
Having all purchasing centralized in one location gives the Vice President of Finance and Head of Administration a real-time view of how spending happens across the entire organization. They can see reports on how the entire company is performing against budgets, and how individual retail and wholesale locations contribute to the bigger picture.
Moreover, retail inventory management is easier than ever. Each store now has full visibility into stock levels. With PLANERGY’s preferred vendor function, employees know that they are ordering items at the best price.
Accounts payable is also managed within PLANERGY. Three-way matching helps the team avoid paying inaccurate invoices by ensuring that they match orders and receipts. Purchase orders, order receipts, and vendor invoices are reconciled automatically in our system. This helps crack down on duplicate, missing, or incorrect orders.
After five years of using PLANERGY, the tire retailer has dramatically improved purchasing efficiency. Instead of chasing down delayed or missing orders or phoning the main office for approvals, the staff can focus on providing guests with high quality tires.
Testimonials
It saves our expense department a lot of time. When we receive invoices, we can look up the purchase order and immediately know it was approved so that the invoice can be paid.
Betty Russell
Vice President of Finance
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