Finally, honest answers to RFQs
It’s a daily nuisance for buyers of aviation parts and services: You send a request for quote (RFQ) for an urgently needed part and never get an answer. Or a vendor promises to send you a part and it either doesn’t arrive or it arrives in poor condition. But improvement is announced by a new quality-rating system unveiled last month by fipart, a German startup firm that operates a trading and networking platform for aviation parts.
What’s most important in business is trust and the quality of your business partners. That’s especially true for online procurement, when you can’t see the person on the other side and often have to rely on your gut feeling.
But gut feeling may play a lesser role in the future thanks to a new quality-rating system unveiled last month by fipart, a German startup firm that operates a trading and networking platform for aviation parts. fipart officials say they are confident the new system will help root out dishonesty and enable users to distinguish more quickly between “good” and “bad” buyers and sellers.
The new quality-rating system was developed to tackle four specific problems that fipart chief executive Andreas Lampprecht says are consistently mentioned by industry professionals: RFQs that go unanswered, misleading inventory information, “price fishing” by fake buyers seeking competitive information and dishonest suppliers.
“It’s unacceptable if a buyer sends an RFQ and doesn’t get a response, or if someone sends out a fake RFQ just to find out what the market price is. This leads to a lot of frustration. We want to get to the core of dishonesty, make transparent who is behind each transaction, and reward reliable and trustworthy companies,” he says.
The overall score is blended
fipart’s quality-rating system aims to address the four challenges through a combination of state-of-the-art technology and user feedback.
Under the new system, each user registered on fipart will receive a score from 0 to 1,000 points. Users who sign up on fipart for the first time, or who have little activity to date, will by default receive a score of 500. The overall score is blended. It reflects a combination of statistics about a user’s behavior on fipart’s trading platform and input from users on fipart’s social networking platform for around 20 different quality indicators, including completeness of a personal or company profile, quality of one’s peer network, percentage of replies to RFQs (for sellers), percentage of RFQs declined, to what extent a company is preferred by other users and whether its listed inventory is up to date.
The algorithm created by fipart’s developers computes the overall score based on the average performance of each individual quality factor. User and company quality ratings will be displayed prominently on fipart to help users make better-informed decisions.
The data will be refreshed every Sunday to reflect user updates, new “tip offs” from the community and new statistics about users and companies. The overall quality scores will be recalculated to reflect the new information.
fipart is quick to point out that it will not be possible to pay for a better quality score or appear at the top of a search result. “This is a really important point for us,” says Ludo van Vooren, fipart’s vice president of customer solutions. “You cannot buy your way into quality on fipart. There will be no way to influence the quality rating except through your own behavior and feedback from users.”
Lampprecht hopes the new quality-rating system will increase “peer pressure” to be viewed as a trustworthy business partner. “Only good behavior can improve your score,” he says. “And the stronger your peers get, the better you must become, too.”
The users of the platform value the website´s straightforwardness and ease of use as well as the simple search and quick availability of rare spare parts as is the case with Lufthansa Technik AG: “Within a very short time, we found a needed part in order to repair a Boeing 757-300. Thus, the aircraft was quickly ready for use again and the airline saved a lot of money.” Apart from Airbus and Boeing, many other well-known names of the aviation industry are among the convinced Fipart customers. Perhaps Iren Dornier, the grandson of the Dornier founder, who runs a company himself dealing with spare parts: “With Fipart we have a strong partner with whom we can offer our customers even more service.”
Since its foundation in 2007, Fipart became the European market leader in this segment. The fact that the company could gain two venture capitalists in October shows that Fipart has the right business concept. Together with the PvH Capital as principal investor, the KfW banking group joined Fipart. “The growth and the innovation rate of the trading and network platform for the aerospace sector are worldwide unique,” KfW states. “We believe that Fipart will play a leading role worldwide over the next five years.”
About fipart
fipart is a web platform for the aviation procurement community that combines trading and networking in one. The company’s mission is to facilitate e-commerce for aftermarket aeronautical parts, products and services. Founded in 2007 by Andreas Lampprecht, Martin Rieger and Oliver Pauser, fipart currently offers around 25 million parts from vendors in more than 100 countries. The company is located in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany, and employs 11 people. www.fipart.com
German Summary
www.fipart.com ist eine Internetplattform für Flugzeugersatzteile und gebrauchtes Zubehör. Rund 25 Millionen Teile werden derzeit angeboten. Bei Fipart treten Airlines, Flughäfen, Service- und Wartungsbetriebe sowie Teilehersteller als Händler und Käufer auf. Fipart definiert sich so-wohl als Handelsplattform als auch als Netzwerk. Seit 2007 haben sich bei der Internetplattform weit über 8 000 Firmen weltweit eingetragen.
Um beispielsweise unlautere Angebotsanfragen und Preisausspähungen zu verhindern, hat Fipart nun ein Bewertungssystem für Teilnehmer installiert. Das Scoring soll den Qualitätslevel dieser Business-to-Business-Lösung für die Luftfahrtindustrie hoch halten und Anwendern helfen, “gute” von “schlechten” Anietern und Käufern schnell zu unterscheiden. Der deutschsprachige Beitrag ist online zu finden auf: www.aerotec-online.com/aero0111fip
Weitere Beiträge
→ Made to measure, not off the rack→ Automated creation of inspection reports
→ Production efficiency improved
→ ISC to push equipment manufacturing business
→ Precision – a key issue for suppliers
