PartSource Ramps-up Regional Warehousing

On Saturday November 10 Mississauga, Ont. became home to the first of 22 PartSource hubs scheduled to open across Canada within the next 24?-?36 months. The opening of this new $1,400,000 concept store will offer Mississauga and surrounding businesses a variety of automotive options including an expanded retail capacity, but also locally specific and regionally targeted warehousing abilities. According to the company, this growth initiative will enable PartSource stores to grow their automotive hard parts business by expanding category assortments and improving local market access for same-day automotive hard parts supply.

“The company is going through a major change project, investing in all levels of the supply chain,” says Bruce Allen, president of PartSource. “That means investment in our three regional warehouses, but also significant investment at the individual store level as well as in these new regional hub stores.”

The new store is part of a network that will open across Canada and act as distribution centres — supplying automotive hard parts on a same day basis for some of the company’s new found commercial clients. According to Allen, the hubs will work as part of an integrated supply network that will provide the hub’s warehousing space with locally specific and targeted merchandise.

“Each hub will be able to warehouse regionally catered products to best serve that market,” he says. “We’ll be able to conduct some regionally-based analytics through our new software systems as well as though internet tools provided to our commercial customers that will allow us to provide them with a greater level of service.”

The most significant attribute of this new focus on local responsiveness will allow the company to establish same-day and even mid-day part deliveries within the areas covered by these hubs.

“Most commercial players in the market have a measure of overnight replenishment from a warehouse,” says Allen. “These changes will give us the ability to forward deploy parts to those hubs which can then in turn provide their commercial customers with planned, routed day-time delivery to supplement their overnight service.”

To celebrate the opening of this store, Allen and number of guests enjoyed a charity BBQ, featuring Monster Truck driver autograph session/appearance by the Aftershock Monster Truck.