How an OEM Leverages the Aucto Marketplace to Sell Surplus Assets in 3 Continents

The Client: 

An industry-leading OEM headquartered in the United States of America with global operations spanning 30 countries. This organization operates manufacturing and assembly facilities under a variety of brands. It is one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers and employs over 100,000 employees. Our client has a centralized asset recovery department that reports to supply chain functions within the organization.

Our Client’s Challenges

Multiple Vendors With Inconsistent Asset Recovery Processes 

Being a global manufacturer, the client has operations and assets spread out in dozens of countries. As such, they were using multiple vendors to manage and sell their surplus assets for each location. This resulted in a lack of standardized processes across facilities. The multi-vendor arrangement also led to a lack of control over the asset disposition process, increasing risk to the enterprise.

Extended Hold on Surplus Assets

At a global level, there was a large number of surplus assets to sell.  But at a local level, it was hard to meet the minimum threshold of vendors who would be able to organize sales events or auctions right away.  The organization ended up having to store and maintain surplus assets for extended periods, resulting in space being wasted and high holding costs. Our client needed a solution that would give them the flexibility to sell assets as they became surplus to ongoing operations. This flexibility would allow them to reduce holding costs and enable them to maintain more control over their asset recovery process.

Lack of Visibility on Surplus Assets

Although this organization had a centralized Asset Recovery (AR) department, each facility seemed to operate within its own terms and processes. The AR team had limited visibility into the quantity and the type of assets that were considered surplus in each of its facilities.  This made procurement, forecasting, and accounting difficult and created silos within the various regional locations.

The Solution

After initial discussions with the client to better understand their asset recovery challenges, we recommended they use the Aucto Marketplace to maximize recovery on their assets while enabling full visibility across their facilities’ assets. Aucto’s web-based, easy-to-use platform would allow them to leverage a single vendor to sell all their surplus assets from anywhere in the world at any time.  There was no requirement to wait and ‘collect’ enough equipment within each facility.  The platform gave their employees visibility and transparency across all their surplus assets to create a more unified and standardized asset recovery process. This allowed for smarter and better decisions being made on how to best group assets together and set prices to gain one of the highest net recovery rates in the industry.