As a key element of their post-sales operations, automotive manufacturers must be able to deliver spare parts to dealers and distributors quickly on demand. This is the case at the European branch of a leading Japanese automotive company, which employs 80,000 people, operates nine manufacturing plants, and sells vehicles through 8,500 retailers and distributors in 56 countries. To give their 8,500 official retailers and distributors across Europe and Africa fast, reliable access to the spare parts they need, the company developed an innovative online parts ordering system, called the New Parts Application (NPA). This is a JAVA-based Delivery Ordering System (DOS) that enables retailers to order parts online, claim for broken or missing parts and check the availability of parts in the company’s local distribution centers.
Orders are sent electronically to Diest, Belgium, where a stock of 260,000 parts and a catalog of a million orderable parts are maintained. Retailers place 120,000 orders on the system every day, and these are typically delivered within one or two working days. With very few of the company’s retailers in the region working in English, the NPA had to be translated into a total of 20 local languages. Initially, this was an extremely daunting prospect. The company was planning to build, host and maintain 20 different versions of the system, as well as updating content and inventory changes manually. But realizing that the cost of developing, hosting and updating different versions of the NPA to meet these language requirements was prohibitive, the company began looking for an alternative, more efficient ways to support online parts ordering in customers’ local languages.
