Keystone Automotive Operations, Inc. - SNA Server Case Study
SNA Server OLE DB Provider for DB2 drives Web-to-host solution for specialty auto parts marketer
Published: March 2000
In a move to expand its market nationwide, Keystone Automotive has created a business-to-business e-commerce site to enable customers to order online. Keystone is able to provide customers with immediate online pricing, inventory, and ordering information by using the OLE DB Provider for DB2 in Microsoft® SNA Server to pull customer data, stored on an AS/400, into a Microsoft SQL ServerTM database. The solution delivers a three-second response and a personalized interface, based on security levels, for each user at the customer site. It also enables Keystone to expand nationwide without dramatically increasing overhead.
Customer Profile
Keystone Automotive Operations, Inc., is the largest specialty parts marketer in the world. In 1998 the company was acquired by GE Capital, Advent International, and Littlejohn & Company, Inc., and has expanded to nine locations throughout North America.
Business Situation
As it has expanded, Keystone's Call Center was experiencing heavy call volumes, which caused an extended wait for retailers placing orders. Keystone decided to create a business-to-business e-commerce solution to enable its customers to get pricing and inventory information and order online.
Solution
Benefits
| • | Immediate access to pricing, inventory, and ordering information for retailers |
| • | Three-second response time |
| • | Expanded potential market with minimal overhead |
Software and Services
Microsoft® Windows NT® Server
Microsoft SNA Server
Microsoft Visual InterDev®
Microsoft Visual Basic®
Microsoft SQL ServerTM
Microsoft Site Server, Commerce Edition
Situation
After almost 30 years as a family-owned business, Keystone Automotive Operations, a major player in aftermarket auto parts, was acquired by GE Capital, Advent International, and Littlejohn & Company in 1998. The new owners planned to expand from a regional company to an international operation. As the expansion progressed, Keystone's call center began to encounter an increasingly heavy call volume, which was causing its retailer customers—called jobbers—to have to wait for pricing or inventory information or to place an order.
Keystone knew that by expediting those interactions, it could not only improve service but also handle more volume without having to add personnel. As the first step in that direction, Keystone recently launched an e-commerce business-to-business Web site using the OLE DB Provider to DB2 in Microsoft SNA Server to provide its customers with access to pricing, inventory, and ordering information from the AS/400 system. The goal is to give customers more information and supply them with a daily contact through the Web, so that they can quickly find out about new products and promotions and order online. In the process, the company hopes to increase the dollar amount of orders from its individual customers.
Keystone contracted with CrossTier.com, a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, to create an e-commerce solution that would eventually provide its customers and suppliers all over the world with immediate access to AS/400 information. The main requirements were that the solution needed to be fast, offer the capability to personalize the interface based on the user profile, and be easily accessible to jobbers. The advantage to adding an e-commerce component was that it would allow Keystone to expand its offerings to a nationwide market, quickly and without a dramatic increase in overhead.
90 Days to Go Live
"We had SNA Server set up within one day and were testing it within that same 24-hour period."
Jay Fee
Vice President
CrossTier.com
The long-term goal for CrossTier.com and Keystone was a business-to-business Web site that provided basic functionality yet could scale to eventually handle 80 percent of Keystone's transactions with customers and retailers. The immediate goal was to create the first phase of that solution, which would simplify the process of selecting from Keystone's more than 250,000 parts and accessories and enable jobbers to look up products and to order online. The challenge was that CrossTier.com joined the project in the middle of July 1999, and Keystone wanted to announce its new service at the annual Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show on November 2 of that year. SEMA is a very high-visibility conference for the automotive aftermarket industry, so it was extremely important to have the solution ready to announce there. And with only 90 days until that event, time was of the essence. "We had to produce a live system in a very short time," explains Jay Fee, Vice President for CrossTier.com. "Because SNA Server is so easy to set up, it was a good fit."
The Web front end consists of Active Server Pages (ASP), built with the Microsoft Visual InterDev® Web development system and the Visual Basic® development system. On the back end, the SNA Server OLE DB Provider for DB2 pulls pricing, inventory, and ordering information, as well as customer personalization data, from the AS/400 into the SQL Server databases. SNA Server polls the AS/400 for inventory changes every five minutes, enables users to review their open orders, and submits orders to the AS/400 as soon as they're placed. In addition, catalog, inventory, and customer information is downloaded nightly to the SQL Server database through Data Transformation Services, which transforms the data into a format compatible with SQL Server.
The ease of use of the OLE DB Provider made it the best choice for the solution, according to Fee. "We had SNA Server set up within one day and were testing it within that same 24-hour period. From that point, the development team spent only about 12 additional hours over a two-week period optimizing it," he says.
The first phase of the solution was completed in time to be introduced at SEMA, and in the months since it has produced remarkable results. Rather than having to page through a huge catalog, Keystone's customers can quickly search for products, view details, get current pricing, check inventory availability, and order the products they want on the spot. Fee estimates that the response time is three seconds or less.
In addition to general ordering information, retailers can get technical notes and find out about other items that can be sold with or instead of a particular product. And the personalization information populates home pages customized for each user, which notify users of special pricing promotions and information tailored to their ordering habits.
"You can build a great front end, but if you can't communicate with the back end and you don't have fast performance, it really doesn't matter. SNA Server enables us to provide that reliable, high-performance connection, easily and cost-effectively."
Jay Fee
Vice President
CrossTier.com
Response Exceeds Expectations
The initial response to the new service has been extremely positive. By the end of January 2000, http://www.eKeystone.com had 333 unregistered users and 127 registered users, which is more than double Keystone's forecast. The numbers continue to grow each week. Perhaps even more telling is that revenue during this time period was almost double the company's initial forecast.
For customers, this solution saves time, improves accuracy, and provides immediate information on inventory availability. Because prices fluctuate throughout any given day, the price updates every half hour ensure that retailers get the most up-to-date price. If something is out of stock, retailers know right away so that they can substitute or at least be aware that they will have a longer wait for that product.
The e-commerce traffic doesn't seem to be diminishing Keystone's Call Center volume, but it is changing the types of calls. In the past, Keystone required two full-time people in the warehouse to handle calls for stock checks. Since the Web site was launched, those calls have decreased so significantly that one person can now handle all the stock checks.
In the first few months, the e-commerce site accounted for approximately 3 percent of all sales, but Keystone is projecting that this figure will grow to 50 percent by the end of 2000. The company also projects that more than 2,200 retailers will be using the site by that time. The potential exists that all of Keystone's 20,000 customers will eventually use the site, but even if that occurs Keystone is confident that the system can easily handle it.
In addition to improving service for its current retailer customers, eKeystone.com is bringing in new business. "We've gotten new accounts because people want to do business over the Web," says Michaelle Pozniak, Information Systems Project Manager.
Future Plans
The next phase for Keystone is to enhance http://www.eKeystone.com with additional functionality, such as:
| • | Personalization and Membership. Adding sales promotions and order summaries to each customer's home page, personalized to each individual jobber, to up-sell and cross-sell based on the jobber's specific habits. |
| • | Credit Card Integration. Enabling Keystone to process credit card payments through the Web site. |
| • | Jobber Reporting. Creating an interface to pull jobber purchasing information—such as the number of orders, number of pieces ordered, and dollar value of items ordered—from the AS/400 and present it in weekly site reports. |
| • | Direct Access to Pricing. Providing direct access to the live AS/400 pricing information and rules so that jobbers have the most current prices, which can change hourly. |
| • | KeySolutions Integration. Enabling customers, who are currently using Keystone's KeySolutions Unix-based point-of-sale accounting system, to order products on eKeystone.com and have that order automatically passed on to the KeySolutions system. |
Phase three will incorporate XML (Extended Markup Language) capabilities to the Web site, which will link eKeystone.com to suppliers' inventory and provide retailers with access to more than 1 million parts and accessories that they can order transparently through the Keystone site.
The eKeystone.com Web site also provides a platform that can help retailers set up their own e-commerce solutions. "We have customers who are interested in branding their Web sites with ours," Pozniak notes. "They would link to our Web site so that when their customers clicked on an item, it would bring them to the eKeystone site, but it would be transparent to the customers."
A critical success factor for both current and future plans is the reliable connection to the AS/400 data via the OLE DB Provider for DB2. "Integration within the back end is the biggest story," Fee notes. "You can build a great front end, but if you can't communicate with the back end and you don't have fast performance, it really doesn't matter. SNA Server enables us to provide that reliable, high-performance connection, easily and cost-effectively."
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