Founded by Dario Orlando in 1988, Steeda is on the leading edge of the automotive aftermarket and helps Ford enthusiasts maximize enjoyment from their vehicles.
The first Steeda Mustang was produced that year and went on to win various races nationwide. But the story didn’t start there. Dario’s grandfather worked at Ford shortly after its creation, going from broom-sweep to the design team. The team eventually influenced the creation of the Thunderbird in 1954, the original Mustang in 1964 and the GT40 that beat Ferrari at LeMans in 1967.
In other words, Steeda has Ford in its DNA.
Today, Steeda still is family owned and is the biggest manufacturer of Ford performance parts, operating both wholesale and direct to consumer businesses.
It operates a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing and distribution center and has a growing eCommerce arm that performed 25,000 eCommerce transactions in 2021 alone.
Outperforming its Legacy Systems
When the pandemic hit in 2020, demand for performance parts increased as home-bound enthusiasts tinkered with their vehicles. As Steeda expanded its operations to meet growing demand, it faced challenges because it could not provide customers with real-time inventory availability on its website.
In addition, running sales promotions required the team to go through SKUs manually, which significantly slowed down operations and sales.
“The spike in demand for our direct-to-consumer business made it clear that it was time to act,” says Chris Cervenka, Director of Marketing at Steeda Autosports. “It was difficult to grow our operation with an inefficient inventory management system and on-premises business system.”
Moving to a High-Octane System for a High-Octane Business
To support its growth, Steeda needed to replace its existing on-premises systems and after careful evaluation, it selected Oracle NetSuite.
With NetSuite, Steeda has a real-time, consolidated view across financials, inventory, order management, point-of-sale and e-commerce processes.
In addition, NetSuite saves the Steeda team days’ worth of time each year by automating manual reporting processes and enabling them to automatically create monthly reports for management. The team uses the time savings to work on new product lines for the Steeda portfolio and improve the eCommerce experience.
“Choosing NetSuite was a no-brainer,” Cervenka says. “We are saving an exponential amount of time with NetSuite. It is helping us track performance and gain a clear view of our business.”
Hitting the Accelerator Toward the Next Opportunity
The demand for Steeda continues to outpace the competition. In the future, Steeda plans to take advantage of NetSuite to improve its website, which represents 90% of revenue. With NetSuite, the Steeda team will be able to improve site speed and search engine optimization, fine-tune live inventory feeds, and automate e-commerce orders to improve efficiency.
Steeda also is looking forward to the release of the next Mustang body style, which represents an opportunity to be first to market—yet again—this time with a highly efficient cloud ERP system for rocket fuel.
“It’s going to be a huge opportunity for us to do what we did with previous Mustangs—but do it bigger and better with NetSuite,” Cervenka says.
Learn more about Steeda Autosports:
Blog Post: “Steeda Autosports Automates Inventory Management for a Shift to D2C”
Customer Testimonial: “Steeda Autosports Fuels D2C Expansion with Inventory Automation”
Video: “Steeda Revs Up Customer Service by Automating Business Processes in NetSuite”
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