The Evolution of the European Automotive Spare Parts Distribution Market

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is 48,000, and 18,000 lines are prepared daily for delivery to dealers. Some 180 employees work in these warehouses.

The Vauxhall warehouse at Luton (UK) has a floor space of 250,000 m2. It is fully owned and managed by Opel. There are 110,000 references on stock, and 30,000 lines are prepared daily for delivery to dealers. No details were available for the Saab warehouse in Sweden. The central warehouses deliver to three types of clients: dealers, other warehouses; and distribution centres in France and Italy. Opel distinguishes between VOR, Rush and Stock orders.

Opel’s 3PL providers are:

Distribution to dealers in the Benelux

One example of Opel’s system is its central warehouse in Rüsselsheim, which makes daily deliveries to the Benelux dealer network. Dealers forward their orders before 5 pm to the Opel DC. At 7 pm, the parts are loaded by Parts Express for delivery the next morning. The orders are collected and labelled by Opel pickers. With respect to the International platforms, some of the spare parts that are to be dispatched by the five central warehouses are prepared for dealer network distribution on platforms that are located in France and in Italy. Note

the closure of DC’s in Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and Portugal - one of Opel’ s strategy is now that every new DC should be managed by a third party logistics provider. Poland was one of the first countries to implement this decision.

95% of all parts are supplied by the four central warehouses. Three kinds of parts receive a special treatment: ➢ Homogeneous parts are stocked right away ➢ Heterogeneous parts are processed before being stocked ➢ Rush parts (500 lines/day) are cross-docked

There are about 8 weeks of stock in the warehouse, implying that stocks rotate 6.5 times annually. There are a total of 30,000 references on stock: 14,000 small parts; 1,000 accessories and paint items; and 8,000 medium size and large parts. All in all, 1,800,000 parts are stocked, 105,000 of which are managed by Breger Transport.

The objective is to reduce the number of references by stocking only the critical 20 % that account for 80 % of all sales.

Each and every day, 12,000 lines are prepared for delivery to dealers. The goal is to break this down into 25 % urgent orders and 75 % stock orders. Currently, productivity amounts to 13.4 lines/hour/man.