Supply and demand fluctuations are making it harder for you to find the product you need at the time you need it. It’s been a year of rapid change, but Pirelli says that has only accelerated the company’s efforts to streamline its offerings and decrease complexity for its dealers.
“Complexity has been one of the biggest challenges so far because the car parc is changing drastically and change has been happening fast recently,” said Erdem Halulu, Pirelli Tire North America’s new vice president of sales and a 16-year veteran of the company. “It’s never easy to adapt your product screen or your availability to the needs of the market as fast as it requires. That’s why we’re trying to make it easier for our business partners both commercially and operationally so that they can have better visibility in their product screens based on consumer needs and adjust faster.”
To do this, Pirelli launched new digital tools as part of its “Customer-Oriented Business Model” during the second half of this year. The tools, part of dealers’ B2B platform with the company, allow dealers to get real-time updates of product availability on their product screens, the company says. Halulu said as Pirelli has integrated with customers’ systems, it has been able to provide product availability updates from every 15 to 30 minutes.
“They [dealers] now have live information for the availability of products, so when they have a consumer in front of them, they can make the right choices based on what’s available,” Halulu said.
Halulu said these new tools are part of a digitalization process the company undertook two years ago in an effort to better tailor “our specific solutions with each business partner.”
“With these new products, we want to be the leader in digitalization,” Halulu said. “One thing this pandemic showed us is how important it is to invest in digitalization and move operations digitally. With the pandemic, we moved at a faster pace to implement these tools for our customers so that they would benefit and be able to get through this time in a more efficient way.”
Looking into 2021, Halulu said Pirelli is optimistic, thanks to a strong market recovery in Q3 and Q4. He said in 2021 and the next few years, Pirelli plans to invest in its IT infrastructure for the U.S. market to move the company’s operations fully digital.
“It’s been a tough year due to COVID, but we’re trying to provide dealers support through better tools in our platforms so that they can provide better offerings to consumers,” Halulu said.
