ASSET: Appropriate Spares Supply and Efficient Transportation Management

The aim of this paper is to present a new integrated logistic concept for a maintenance supply chain (MSC) exemplified by a case study about spare parts management and logistic chains. Under pressure of international competition in spite of different grades of technology development, nowadays maintenance organisations have to provide the same well quality services even for old expanded and unstructured equipment. Sporadic machine break downs make it difficult to calculate proper and reliable material requirement forecasts. In order to prevent an inventory shortage, large quantities of diverse spare parts are consequently purchased in advance. Long time analysis of machine break down frequencies, evaluation of spare parts and human resources costs show that an aligned strategic procurement concept integrating even suppliers can reduce the stock and transportation level (respectively stock and transportation costs) rapidly and enable a high technical availability at the same time. Furthermore maintenance organisations operate in complex supply chains confronted with strong interdependencies between spare parts suppliers and logistics providers. By the use of stand-alone computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) material orders are frequently sent manually to the suppliers and therefore the resulted delivery time has been proven to be insufficient leading to long dead times and rising production costs. To overcome this obstacle of company orders an overall reference model for the optimization of processes and organisational structures of all participants in the spare parts distribution network has been elaborated. Moreover an open IT-platform has been developed in order to establish well and reliable communication between all MSC-participants (starting with the end-customer via maintenance service provider, spare parts retailer, spare parts producer and ending with the logistics service provider) and their business software solutions (i.e. enterprise resource planning (ERP), CMMS and so on). At last an appropriate business model was established in order to assure the efficient utilisation of the IT-platform. Within this concept new condition monitoring and mobile device technologies have been integrated in the (semi-) automatic generation of spare part orders by the CMMS, directly injected into the suppliers’ ERP-system. Due to the connection to real-time order processing the order-to-deliver time of spare parts can be notably reduced. Consequently maintenance tasks can be managed more reliable and break-down times and rates are decreasing.