Acer, the world’s third-largest PC brand, has stopped selling spares direct to end-users and resellers in Africa and has now upgraded SPL from an Authorised Spares Reseller to be its chosen route to market for upgrades and replacement parts.
Acer country service manager, Dave Malherbe, said Acer has a longstanding relationship with SPL. “SPL has long been regarded as one of South Africa’s leading IT services channels, supporting many well-known brands. Moreover, SPL has an established distribution network countrywide, and beyond into Africa.”
SPL is the authorised parts distributor and warranty processing agents for many of SA’s computing and print brands, including HP, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Toshiba, among others.
Many organisations choose to outsource spare parts management to specialists in this field due to the (growing) complexity of the spare parts business – in terms of profiling stock appropriately to reach high fill-rates but also limit obsolescence as spare parts tend to become unsellable within very short timeframes; and also to manage logistics of small, urgent items and the reverse-logistics of items.
Since appointment, SPL has steadily invested into the Acer channel with profiling technologies and local inventory, and the result has been exceptional: a 300% improvement recorded in SPL’s first-pass fill rate (i.e. the amount of the time SPL has parts in stock immediately upon customer requests).
“One of the major benefits that has arisen from our high stocking levels has been our ability to provide all our OEM business partners with the comfort that their customers are being supplied nationally at service levels which allows them to deliver world-class IT services, on a par with Europe,” added Chris Cox, SPL’s managing director.
This additional relationship significantly strengthens SPL’s position as a multi-vendor parts supplier, thus enhancing its position as a single sourcing point of contact that many of its customers prefer.
