Jan. 21, 2014—uParts Inc., a provider of cloud-based parts procurement solutions for the collision repair industry, recently announced that it has trademarked the term “Procurement Efficiency” and developed a Procurement Efficiency Index (PEI) for shops to evaluate suppliers.
With PEI, uParts evaluates all aspects of parts transactions to produce a single score from one to 10 that measures supplier performance.
uParts said shops can use the PEI measurement to evaluate and manage their suppliers. Michael Quinn, president of uParts, said suppliers with low PEI scores often cause “major” cycle time delays, and the new measurement can help improve efficiency in the shop.
“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 and CEO of Irvine, Calif.-based 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,” Adegan continued. “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 compliments cycle time and CSI by objectively measuring supplier performance on each and every part transaction.”
uParts is designed to capture and time-stamp every transaction and interaction between shops and suppliers throughout the parts ordering process. Other details are also available so repairers can review individual performance for each function. uParts said the data is used in the PEI calculation to measure suppliers on several components, such as responsiveness, depth of inventory, delivery time, return rates and part quality.
The component scores are combined to yield a single PEI score for each supplier, which uParts said enables repairers to objectively evaluate and compare them.
