Following is a preview of new functionality to be released in c9 in the coming versions.  Possibly before Christmas, definitely by new year.

C9 will soon include the ability to import electronic catalogues.  From within c9, browse catalogues fast and easy, and sell parts straight off the catalogue.

Catalogues are imported, similar to importing price files.  Imported catalogues are also available for publishing on the website.

Example screen shot: Browsing/Finding Units by type/year/model/franchise

Example screen shot: Viewing Catalogues

The C9 system is increasingly becoming more sophisticated and intelligent in terms of its capacity to meaningfully crunch the business data it collects and provide meaningful feedback, for things such as recommended stocking levels and useful charts such as customer retention analysis.  Normally, c9 users need not worry about this, it is barney's headache (actually a hobby). But there are some areas you need to be aware of, that the information you are looking at needs to be considered in light of the underlying processes used to derive it.

Consider a chart report; customer retention. Here is such a report taken from live data.

Note the bit I have highlighted in green.  It appears as though retention is dropping off, but this is not necessarily so. It could be a statistical artefect.

Consider a customer who brings their bike in every 12 months for a service.  Their last service was 3 months ago. I run the customer retention report.  Obviously between 3 months ago and when he first become a customer he is counted as a retained customer. But what about today. In order to count him as a retained customer we need to assume that he will come back in 9 months.  The above c9 report does indeed do this, it looks at individual customers, their return rates and makes a prediction when he comes back.  If the customer comes back every 12 months like clock work then it is easy. But what happens if there is variance? i.e. he comes in after 9 months one year, 14 months the next etc etc.  c9 needs to be able to cope with this variance and make a reasonable prediction. But it is only a prediction; so the tail end of the graph is somewhat inaccurate. Also, consider customers c9 has only seen once, currently c9 lacks a means/model to make a guess whether or not they are new retained customers or once off customers only.    So never read too much into the tail end of a graph such as this one.

As of version 4.224, c9 now includes more sophisticated restocking analysis tools to help you manage your stock levels and avoid overstocking and understocking. The new set of tools provides:

• A sophisticated statistical model that makes restocking recommendations and responds to: sale history for last 18 months. list price of the item, and margin gain for stock ordering vs overnight ordering.
• Statistical model is able to recognise and cope with seasonal items (identifying high and low seasons), long term gradual trends and unusually high once off orders.
• Ability to tune the model, selecting either aggressive, modest or conservative restocking goals depending on how much stock you wish to maintain.
• Ability to tune the model on a per franchise basis. i.e. aggressively stock your principal franchise, and maintain more modest stocking levels for secondary franchises and accessory suppliers
• A 'flight simulator' that allows you to check how the model settings would perform based on last 6 months of business; showing you resulting overstocking (dead stock) and understocking (overnight ordering) if the model was used for all stock re-ordering. Allowing you to tune towards the mix that is suitable for your inventory.
• Ability to configure per-part hints and exceptions. i.e. 'never stock this part', or 'increasing reordering by 100% for this part'. i.e. sale history and list price are sometimes insufficient for decision making. i.e. things like oil filters you never want to run out of so it is appropriate to aggressively overstock these.
• Makes recommendations for items you do not currently stock but should and is able to resolve super-cession chains
• A redesigned analysis UI that instead of making you trawl through your entire stock, allows you to focus on items that may be potentially understocked or overstocked, so instead of exhaustively checking thousands of items, you only check the top 50 items.
• The ability to reorder based on preset maxqty levels or using the calculated numbers generated by restocking analysis

Important note: Restocking analysis of a part requires that the part has moved in at least 4 separate  restocking periods in the past 18 months.   A restocking period is amount of time on average between stock orders. If you've never placed a stock order for a brand new franchise for example, system assumes 30 days.  So say your restocking period is 2 weeks, then for a brand new item that you order for customers, c9 will not recommend you stock it for 8 weeks at absolute minimum.

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As of pending version 4.223 of c9, a significant change will be made to c9.  An existing feature (deferred payments) will be completely removed and instead be replaced with an alternative and improved mechanism that achieves the same aim.

The primary purpose of this post is to alert dealers that use the deferred payments facility so that you are aware of the change before you upgrade.  Also this post will highlight how to solve an occasional spare parts selling arrangement: the ability to reserve stock for a cash customer, but not actually raise an invoice for the stock until they come in to receive the parts.

We try to avoid making significant changes to the software that modify the way the software is used for daily operation.  In this circumstance, we are of the view that the existing deferred payment system is broken and it weakens the c9 product so we taken the decision to remove it entirely from c9.    The primary reason why is that the solution is confusing and error prone and difficult to properly manage.  We instead went with a solution that merges behaviour of customer order processing so that the same process you use to process customer orders that have been received is the same process you use to process items placed on reserve.  This approach has numerous advantages which we hope will come clear to you as you use the new capability in c9.

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The holy grail of inventory control is the ability to forecast what customers are going to buy and when, order those parts from the supplier, and sell them to the customer before you pay the invoice to your supplier. And to never ever carry excess stock.

For 10 years or so now c8/c9 has offered some basic tooling that provides dealers an estimate of what stock re-order levels should be; i.e. max checker. It generates reasonable numbers based on analysing the sales figures for up to 12 months, but there are a number of things that cause it to generate poor results under some circumstances; such as sporadic/slow moving parts or seasonal stock.

With advent of c9 and some very powerful enabling technologies available to us, we are now exploring and testing more sophisticated statistical approaches to the problem of providing more material support to spare parts managers in their task of tuning restocking levels.  We are testing statistical models that encompass a dozen different variables and considerations, and we are tuning these models against 'flight simulators', that test how variation in different pre-set biases affect business profitability when it comes to stock control.

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C9 software has built into it a specially designed spare parts order export specifically for Husqvarna.   To use this file though you need to change settings in Husqvarna online website. The settings are as follows:

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Instead of re-keying part numbers discovered in Parts Manager Pro (PMP) into c9; you can setup PMP to save parts onto the computer and have c9 pick those parts up.

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C9, and some of our competitor DMS platforms, offer the ability to query available stock while in the middle of point of sale.

In c9, you select a part on screen and press the 'F12' key. It will query for quantity held by the supplier.

For example:

For dealers, this ability is a massive time saver; and saves them the hassle to login to a dealer website and re-key the part number in order to query to see if the item is in the country; or call the supplier to query for the part.  The result is better experience for everyone, the spare parts manager, the supplier and importantly the customer on the other side of the counter.

For suppliers to offer this feature to C9 or other DMS they need to publish some sort of Internet based integration application programming interface that will allow DMS platforms to connect in.

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C8/C9 for years has offered a notion of a discount which is a percentage discount from the retail price.  Latest version of c9 now gives you options for 2 other discounting strategies, 3 in total. You can configure each account with a different strategy and select strategy at point of sale.

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Parts Magician is a web service that allows dealers to query other dealers for obscure or hard to get parts via an Internet application.

Recent changes in c9 make it very easy to both query for parts, while in C9 Point of  Sale, and to advertise your inventory availability to other c9 users via Parts Magician.

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