uParts Inc., an independent provider of cloud-based parts procurement solutions to the collision repair industry, has trademarked and developed an index called Procurement Efficiency Index (PEI). With PEI, uParts evaluates all aspects of the parts transaction to produce a single score from one to 10 that measures supplier performance. Repair shops can use PEI to evaluate and manage their suppliers.
“We are pleased to introduce a simple and objective measurement to help our collision repair partners gain visibility into their suppliers’ performance,” said Alex Adegan, founder & CEO of uParts. “We are proud the U.S. Patent Office has recognized our approach as unique and granted our trademark. From the beginning, our focus has been on efficiency in the parts procurement process. As a result of our tireless collaboration with many leading collision repairers and suppliers, we now have the first major new key performance indicator (KPI) for our industry in over a decade. Parts have gradually grown to represent almost half of the repair cost, and yet no one has been able to measure their impact on the repair process – until now. PEI complements cycle-time and CSI by objectively measuring supplier performance on each and every part transaction.”
“Do you know your suppliers’ PEI Scores? You should,” said Michael Quinn, president of uParts. “Your low-scoring suppliers are likely causing major delays in your repair cycle time. With this new measurement, repairers are improving efficiency by adopting the uParts solution.”
uParts is designed to capture and timestamp every one of the dozens of transactions and interactions between shops and their suppliers that make up a collision repair order. In addition to timestamps, other details are available to review individual performance for each function. This data is utilized in the calculation of PEI to measure suppliers on criteria such as their responsiveness, depth of inventory, delivery time, return rates, part quality and others. The component scores are then combined to yield a single PEI score for each supplier, enabling repairers to objectively evaluate and compare them.
“When you have a process, and an electronic tool to monitor the process, now you can find out where the process broke down and where you have failures so that you can get better,” said Randy Stabler, CEO of Pride Auto Body in Los Angeles. “Prior to uParts, we had no visibility on that.”
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