Uni-Select's Efficient Fulfillment Of 100,000 SKUs

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

May 2014 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

Time-sensitive fulfillment of a massive product base is critical to sales at $2 billion Uni-Select.

Uni-Select just might be the biggest retailer you’ve never heard of. The company’s 34 distribution centers supply more than 100,000 automotive aftermarket parts to 240 corporate-branded and thousands of independent retail stores and automotive service facilities in the U.S. and Canada. In this fast-changing and growing industry, inventory visibility and fulfillment are keys to success.

“In the automotive service and repair industry, our customers expect to have the parts they order in 30 minutes,” says Todd Barker, VP of supply chain for Uni-Select. “This demand magnifies the common ‘right part, right place, right price’ inventory management mantra.” It’s a challenge that’s further exacerbated by the company’s growth-through-acquisition strategy. “In little more than a decade, we’ve made more than 50 acquisitions,” says Barker. “Each time we acquired a company, we incorporated the DC operations systems that company used into our legacy environment. As a result, we operated a mixed-bag of inventory management systems on a mixed-bag of platforms,” he says.