How UAP Inc. Transformed Its Reporting and Data Processes with DealRoom

About the Company  

United Auto Parts Limited (UAP) is a Montreal-based automotive parts distributor and merchandiser with a large presence throughout Canada. Founded nearly a century ago in 1926, the company is a subsidiary of Genuine Parts Company (GPC), North America’s largest auto parts distribution network.  

UAP employs approximately 5,000 individuals across two divisions: Auto Parts and Heavy Vehicle Parts. The former offers replacement parts and other supplies for light trucks and cars, while the latter caters to the construction and trucking markets. To drive its growth, the organization has embraced an M&A strategy that involves multiple transactions each year.  

Challenges  

Like all of GPC’s subsidiaries, UAP managed its own M&A pipeline and reported key transaction data to its parent company. However, without a Buyer-Led M&A™ framework, the team relied on a massive Excel spreadsheet to track deals—an approach that lacked scalability and adaptability. 

With multiple transactions at various stages in UAP’s pipeline, organizing notes and updating the document quickly became cumbersome and time-consuming. This inefficiency hindered cross-functional alignment and made it challenging to ensure all stakeholders operated with consistent, accurate information. 

To make matters worse, creating digestible reports for colleagues at GPC was very cumbersome. When spreadsheets were shared, they were often already outdated or inaccurate, undermining data-driven decision-making. Moreover, the involvement of external stakeholders, such as sellers and bankers, raised concerns about access control and data security, highlighting the absence of customer-centric safeguards. 

Negative Business Impacts

• UAP executives couldn’t easily report deal progress or potential roadblocks to their counterparts at GPC, leading to misalignment and confusion on both sides.
• Reliance on Excel spreadsheets hindered scalability and failed to provide the transparency necessary for managing high-volume scenarios. This lack of visibility made it difficult to plan resources effectively.
• External collaborators, such as sellers and financial institutions, were worried about data security, creating hesitancy around potential transactions.
• Complex projections and what-if scenarios were impossible to create without custom Excel formulas and did not reflect real-time information.
• Using only Excel comments and notes made collaboration and discussion between multiple groups, including sellers, legal advisors, bankers, and UAP execs, difficult.

UAP’s M&A department realized all of these factors were hindering the current and potential value of their transactions. It was time to make a change.  

Solution  

As reporting requests from GPC leadership continued to increase, the UAP team realized they needed an M&A-integrated platform to track and report on their numerous transactions. So, they began searching for an M&A management tool, completing demos for multiple platforms and sending their top contenders up the chain to GPC. Key selection criteria included robust reporting capabilities and strong access controls, as well as ease of use and setup.

DealRoom stood out for its ability to create different “rooms” for each deal phase, including sourcing, pipeline management, and due diligence. In addition, the platform offered custom reporting through its BI Reporting feature/functionality, excellent customer support with hands-on onboarding, and strong security.

Why DealRoom? 

• The platform could support multiple deal phases, keeping each step connected enough to drive collaboration but independent enough to avoid disorganization. 
• An intuitive UI made it easy to get up and running, even for external users. 
• The massive Excel file that the team was working with could quickly be transferred into DealRoom without loss of information.  
• DealRoom offers detailed permissions options down to the document level, ensuring each party has access to all the information they need—and none of the information they don’t. 

With faster, more accurate reporting and improved security, the team at UAP could save time, streamline processes, and collaborate more easily with external stakeholders.  

Outcomes 

Today, UAP manages all of their transactions through DealRoom and has experienced the following benefits: 

• Improved Reporting: DealRoom provided UAP with access to real-time data and easy-to-build BI reports, leading to more strategic data-driven decision-making and increased transparency around the pipeline. 
• Quick Ramp-up: UAP was able to dive right into their current transactions due to DealRoom’s intuitive UI, excellent onboarding, and instant Excel data import. 
• Time Savings: Without a massive spreadsheet to search through and reporting now available at the click of a button, the team at UAP has more time to focus on higher-value activities. 
• Tailored Views: DealRoom’s views feature allows stakeholders to create different layouts of the same data according to their preferences and work styles.
• Future Use Cases: The UAP team has seen so much success managing due diligence, sourcing, and FP&A in DealRoom that They have started using the platform for project management and integration / post-closing checklists.
• Faster Communication: By assigning action items to sellers and colleagues, the M&A team no longer has to chase down stakeholders for information.
• Streamlined Collaboration: Individual rooms dedicated to particular deal phases allowed for clear ideation and discussion between UAP, sellers, and other groups.
• ‍Strong Security: With security permissions down to the document level, all stakeholders can rest assured that their data is safe and confidentiality is maintained.

"We wanted to maximize value, so finding ways to leverage DealRoom across different aspects of our business was both exciting and compelling for us." – Carlo Aragona, Manager, Financial Planning and Transformation