April 23, 2013—PartsTrader, the Web-based portal used to facilitate State Farm Insurance’s electronic parts procurement initiative, on Tuesday released a “significant upgrade” to the application that includes a new feedback function.
PartsTrader said the new function allows both repairers and suppliers to provide feedback on the performance of their trading partners. The company said repair shops and parts suppliers in the five pilot markets have consistently requested addition of the capability.
Within the ordering functionality of the PartsTrader application, shops and suppliers can provide quantitative feedback on how well the other party performed on randomly selected transactions. Users are also able to provide proactive feedback on a business partner.
"In order for us to build and maintain a program that is beneficial to repairers and suppliers, it was critical for us to deliver the ability to provide real-time feedback on performance," said Dale Sailer, vice president of business development for PartsTrader. "So many companies lose customers each year without any idea why they lost the business, or didn't gain the new customer that they hoped to work with."
PartsTrader said information obtained through the feedback will be used to present a star-based rating for each repairer and supplier in future releases of the application. The ratings will provide repairers with a tool to evaluate new suppliers, and provide suppliers with a tactic to determine their interest in submitting parts quotes to unknown repairers.
"For years we have heard the industry asking for a way to objectively evaluate business performance throughout the parts supply chain,” said Rob Cooper, CEO of PartsTrader. "This new feature is the first step in PartsTrader's users being able to make informed decisions as they consider building new business relationships for buying or selling repair parts."
Along with the user feedback functionality, PartsTrader said it also released other program updates, including the ability to cancel parts placed on a fax order within the system, and user-recommended improvements on the quoting and part selection screens.
