Spare parts management, of machine and plant spare parts, will change completely in the next 5-10 years. A business model of availability, in the form of services, will take the place of spare parts warehouses worth millions, on site in the factories of many operators.
Today's CAPEX intensive practices will change in this way to OPEX based models. In concrete terms, this means that inventories on the operator side are a relic of the past and disappear from the books (off-balancing). In this way, additional scrapping costs are avoided, which are usually incurred after plants are decommissioned and unneeded spare parts are removed from the warehouses after years.
In this context, SPARETECH has identified three key drivers that describe this change process for spare parts management. These are:
- Availability
- Automationand
- ActionableInsights
Availability in this context means that spare parts are available anytime and anywhere. Machine operators no longer physically own the part, but secure a ranted availability. In this way, working capital can be reduced by more than 80%, because parts are only actually procured when they are needed. This form of availability is made possible by the networking of systems in the cloud as well as software innovations and error-free master data.
The second A describes automation. In the future, spare parts will be identified and ordered within seconds. Today's processes, such as searching Google to identify the part or requesting a quote by e-mail, are a thing of the past. In the future, the request for a spare part will be answered reliably on the basis of the immense database, so that virtually no technical clarification cases will occur in the course of the procurement process, e.g., due to a surprising discontinuation of a part.
Actionable Insights, as the third A, describes the increasing network intelligence in spare parts management. For example, decisions on stocking spare parts are supported on the basis of anonymized consumption data from other market participants. New business models such as spare parts pooling are emerging. Regional customers are supplied with spare parts from an external spare parts warehouse operated by a service provider. This also enables operators and suppliers of spare parts to join forces and implement automated purchasing solutions on the basis of shared data. The otherwise difficult field of spare parts after-sales, which is otherwise characterized only by a low level of predictability in demand on the customer side, becomes a controllable discipline. At last, there are sufficient data points for reliable demand planning for spare parts from the manufacturer's and supplier's perspective.
In order to realize this vision, SPARETECH is already working very closely with strong partners from the fields of industrial automation and logistics, as well as with financing partners, and will present the first pilot of the AAA reality as early as 2021.
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