A case study about how Takt helped CarParts.com achieved visibility into its activities on the warehouse floor, and improve its operations in the process.

CarParts.com is a leading e-commerce provider of a wide variety of auto parts. According to director of facilities Nick Hogue, the company recently underwent a growth spurt, from two distribution centers to five, and needed to acquire better visibility into how it was processing orders.

CarParts.com places a high priority on customer service, working to get orders to buyers within 24 hours. “Our goal is to be the Amazon.com of car parts,” Hogue says.

The company was looking for a way to track labor in the DCs, as well as get visibility into where it could make improvements. It chose Takt in part because, like CarParts.com, it was a startup company — one that could provide real-time insight into operations.

In engaging with customers, Takt emphasizes partnerships, says chief product officer Noah MacMichael. “Our job isn’t done just because the software is up and running,” he says. “We take an active interest in the customer’s continuous-improvement journey.”

Implementation of the software was fairly straightforward, Hogue says. Initially, the application was rolled out in one DC, but within two months it was operating in all five.

Most of the setup time was devoted to sitting down with the CarParts.com operations team to understand how it viewed the business, and which key performance indicators it sought to manage the facilities.

MacMichael says CarParts.com’s ambitions extended well beyond the needs of the moment, with a commitment to continuous growth. But that requires close control of the order-fulfillment process. “They were hungry for visibility — a tool that was not just bolted on to their [warehouse management system], but provided true insight into how is my day going, what’s going well and what isn’t, and what I should be focusing on to drive financial improvement.”