When the Part You Don’t Have Costs You the Order: A Q&A with Partstown’s Doug Buis

At ketteQuest 2026 in Atlanta, I sat down with Doug Buis, known internally at Parts Town as the “OEM Overlord” and officially as Group Vice President of Inventory Management and Analytics. Parts Town is a leading OEM-only distributor of foodservice and residential appliance parts, and Doug leads the team responsible for making sure the right part is in the right place the moment a customer’s equipment goes down. What struck me most in talking with Doug is the sheer complexity he manages daily, hundreds of thousands of SKUs, a single-source OEM model, and customers who call only when something’s already gone wrong.  

I always enjoy these conversations because they show exactly how ketteQ’s technology translates into real financial and operational performance, not just theoretical value. We talked about what makes OEM parts availability so hard to get right, why a spreadsheet-based process couldn’t keep up with double-digit growth, and what changed once ketteQ came into the picture.

Q: Can you tell us about your role at Parts Town?

A: I lead our Inventory Management and Supply Chain function. My official title is Group Vice President of Inventory Management and Analytics, though internally I’m affectionately known as the OEM Overlord.

Q: What makes inventory availability so challenging in your business?

A: We’re genuine OEM, so for most parts, there’s only one source, which makes staying connected upstream with our OEM partners critical to getting ahead of any disruption. We’re also managing hundreds of thousands of SKUs at the part-plant level, and the customer calling us has already had a bad day; equipment is down, and a restaurant may be at risk of not being able to serve the left side of its menu. Solving for a customer in crisis across a massive assortment with a single source of supply is what makes world-class part availability so hard.

Q: What was inventory planning like before ketteQ, and what was the breaking point?

A: Back in late 2019 and early 2020, we ran a proprietary forecasting algorithm in spreadsheets and Access databases. It worked, but it wasn’t scalable at our double-digit growth rate. The light bulb went on when it was taking a small team and me multiple days to build a forecast at the part-plant level, and we couldn’t get through a monthly review fast enough to take care of the parts that mattered most, all while our footprint was expanding from a couple of DCs to global, regional, and local fulfillment centers.

Q: Did you evaluate other solutions before choosing ketteQ?

A: We did, both when we started and again more recently. We began our ketteQ journey with one division in 2020 and have since expanded to two more: our residential and commercial appliance parts business and our USG service branch business. ketteQ gave us the right combination: a team of actual inventory practitioners who understood our world, paired with nimble and innovative software that could flex to how we wanted to plan our parts.

Q: What results have you seen since deploying ketteQ?

A: Early on, the goal was to hold service levels while reducing our working capital investment in inventory, and we achieved a 10 to 15 percent inventory reduction relatively quickly for our Parts Town America business, while maintaining and more recently improving fill rates. Since then, the focus has evolved into building real discipline around demand planning and forecasting accuracy. We’re now in the early days of our next-gen deployment on the residential side, having launched our first wave this past April with six major appliance brands, and we’re already seeing steady service-level improvements and opportunities to level-load inventory.  

Q: What led you to expand ketteQ into Parts Town Home and USG?

A: Our three divisions have been coming together under a philosophy of becoming better together, and standardizing our tech stack is part of that. Parts Town America is roughly twice the size of the other two, so once we’d proven results there, rolling ketteQ out to Parts Town Home was a low-risk next step. USG let us prove the concept in the service branch world, and once that proof succeeded, we committed to investing further with ketteQ across our other divisions.

Q: How has day-to-day work changed for your planners?

A: Dramatically. Before, a small group did end-to-end planning, and by the time you finished a good forecast, it was already time to refresh it. Now we have dedicated teams: one focused purely on forecast accuracy, one on the real-world constraints against that unrestricted forecast, and one handling everything after the purchase order is submitted. What used to be one person splitting attention three ways is now three disciplines, each going deeper into its own opportunities.

Q: You’ve also been part of ketteQ’s VIP program. What has that added?

A: We’re on our fourth full year in the VIP program. It started with ERP integrations and development work, but it’s evolved into something focused on making tomorrow better rather than just surviving today. We have collaborative weekly meetings with a dedicated team that knows our business, prioritize our aspirations together, and hold each other accountable for results. It’s been a strong investment.

Q: What’s been a pleasant surprise along the way?

A: I didn’t want to just pick a software vendor. It mattered that the culture of the people we’d work with fit ours, that our values aligned, and that we were working with former inventory practitioners who understood our language and could challenge us on inventory discipline. I found all of that, and it made the decision easy.

Q: How has this partnership impacted the business overall?

A: From a macro view, ketteQ has let us scale at the speed our business was growing. We wouldn’t have been able to keep adding distribution centers and put our name on our best work without a way to systematize our planning. It’s also made us more sophisticated up and down the chain, from automated reports that remove surprises for our OEM partners, to giving downstream customers confidence that we’ll deliver world-class part availability when they need it most.

Q: One word to describe ketteQ, and what makes it special?

A: Powerful. The secret sauce is the mix of innovation, inventory practitioner experience, and nimbleness. I can ask for a customization, and it’s rarely met with resistance; it’s more “help us understand the need,” and we usually land on a working solution. Customizing most tech stacks feels like turning a cruise ship. With ketteQ, it feels like turning a jet ski.

Doug’s story is a reminder that scaling a genuine OEM parts business takes more than software, it takes a partner who understands the practitioner’s job and can move at the speed the business demands. At ketteQ, we’re proud to support Parts Town’s inventory planning across three divisions and counting, and we’re excited to keep growing alongside them.

To learn more about how ketteQ’s Planning Solutions help distributors scale part availability without scaling headcount, visit ketteQ.com.

さらに詳しく

Watch Doug's full Q&A video from our Supply Chain Rewired Series.