Headquartered in Enfield CT, Camerota Truck Parts was founded in 1960 and has evolved into the Northeast’s premier provider of new and remanufactured manual and automatic transmissions, rear differentials, steering boxes, transfer cases, and driveline services for trucks and equipment of all sizes. The company offers full-service repair, diagnostics, and installation, as well as sales and distribution of major OEM product lines. 

In addition to the variety of unit types, Camerota’s finished remanufactured units have typically differed significantly from each other due to customization, as well as sourcing from varying parts manufacturers. This made managing inventory and documenting finished units challenging.

This challenge was compounded by 1999, when the company had grown to two locations. At the time, the software in use was essentially an invoicing system with some limited inventory management features, proving inadequate.  

“On the production side of the business, we were still doing most things manually,” explained Camerota’s IT Administrator, Mark Flebeau. “For everything we did, the guys out in the shops would pull parts off the shelf and write onto a work order card. Once they finished the unit they were working on, the work order would be sent over to the parts department so that the inventory could be taken out of stock. Then that list of parts had to go up to accounting. Accounting had to take the cost of those parts and move it from inventory to cost of goods manually. It was a tedious manual process.”

Camerota management realized that such outdated manual processes, combined with the large variety of complex finished units, posed a quality-assurance challenge, as well as a potential impediment to growth. So, they selected AutoPower to help migrate the company toward a much more automated and integrated solution. 

In addition to the fact that the AutoPower system was an end-to-end integrated solution, one of the deciding factors was AutoPower’s willingness to tailor their system to accommodate Camerota’s specific business requirements. 

Deploying the system in 1999 began with ingesting Camerota’s 1998 business data and adapting the system to track and document parts for the company’s wide range of remanufactured units, and to capture any changes that occurred in unit designs.  

“With everything captured digitally, we just have vastly better overall tracking, data insights, and reporting capabilities,” Flebeau asserted. “The deep and very stable database provides us with easy access to transactions dating back to 1998, and the custom modifications AutoPower brought to the table were game changers. For instance, AutoPower developed nonconformance product reports, so we can fill in the work order number for a product that failed, see the customer information, and track the corrective actions—you know, whether we gave the customer another unit or fixed his unit—and track our costs. If a particular type of failure occurs multiple times, we can create a corrective action, standardize it, and track it. It all stays in the system, thoroughly documented, and we can run reports from it.” 

The comprehensive tracking, documenting and reporting capabilities of the AutoPower system enable the company’s quality assurance and warranty management programs to operate efficiently. Most importantly, they are critical to the company’s compliance with ISO standards, which are internationally recognized to improve manufacturing processes and documentation through standardized procedures, enhanced quality control, and documented systems—all for the purpose of reducing errors, increasing efficiency, and improving customer satisfaction.

Since adopting the AutoPower system 26 years ago, Camerota Truck Parts has grown to around 200 employees operating eight locations across seven states. And the growth continues: the company has added more than a thousand new customers in each of the last two years, now produces thousands of units annually and has amassed approximately a thousand build sheets. Flebeau shared, “When one of our guys gets an order, he receives a build sheet and all the parts he needs is on that sheet. He just clicks on it, lights them up just one time, takes them out of stock and puts them on the work order, and that’s it—and it’s impossible for him to order a wrong part because the system simply prevents that from happening.”  

Flebeau furthered noted that Camerota’s partnership with AutoPower is expected to continue serving as a critical enabler of the company’s productivity and growth.