Southern California-based China Manufacturers Alliance (CMA) unites major tire manufacturers in China under a cooperative alliance. The CMA product lines include tires ranging from Light Truck to Off the Road Agricultural and Industrial tires. CMA has photos, warranties and specification documents for each of the manufacturers and lines. Tires are sold to customers in the American and European tire marketplaces.
Challenge: Transition Dealer Order Process From Phone to Web
CMA has a complex pricing scheme that offers tiered pricing to specific customers and honors exclusive agreements with others. Their customers are tire dealerships who order containers from China or truckloads from domestic warehousing. Items must be sold based on tire volume to fill either a container or a truck.
The new ordering portal had to be easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain. It had to be available from any internet connected computer and governed by logon security by client. Product visibility and pricing had to be client specific. Each product had to be tracked by volume for purposes of filling containers and truckloads. Finally, the system needed to export the orders in an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) file formatted for import to their company’s main order processing system.
The portal would be the interface to CMA for their entire dealer network, and allow dealers to place orders 24 hours a day. Our challenge was to incorporate all the CMA portal requirements in an intuitive and easy to use solution.
Solution: Intuitive Web Portal for Easy Order Entry
We designed the CMA portal on a proven Business-to-Business e-commerce platform. Features include login access, visibility of products and pricing by client, data interchange to and from their back office order processing system for pricing updates and order exports. A flexible Administration section allows CMA the ability to run special promotions, amend freight charges, and add customers and their unique pricing in a very streamlined manner.