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When managing service parts, you don\u2019t know what will break and when because part failures are random and sudden. As a result, demand patterns are most often extremely intermittent and lack significant trend or seasonal structure. The number of part-by-location combinations is often in the hundreds of thousands, so it\u2019s not feasible to manually review demand for individual parts. Nevertheless, it is much more straightforward to implement a planning and forecasting system to support spare parts planning than you might think.<\/p>\n
This conclusion is informed by hundreds of software implementations we\u2019ve directed over the years. Customers managing spare parts and service parts (the latter for internal consumption\/MRO), and to a lesser degree aftermarket parts (for resale to installed bases), have consistently implemented our parts planning software faster than their peers in manufacturing and distribution.<\/p>\n
The primary reason is the role in manufacturing and distribution of business knowledge about what might happen in the future. In a traditional B2B manufacturing and distribution environment, there are customers and sales and marketing teams selling to those customers. There are sales goals, revenue expectations, and budgets. This means there is a lot of business knowledge about what will be purchased, what will be promoted, whose opinions need to be accounted for. A complex planning loop is required. In contrast, when managing spare parts, you have a maintenance team that fixes equipment when it breaks. Though there are often maintenance schedules for guidance, what is needed beyond a standard list of consumable parts is often unknown until a maintenance person is on-site. In other words, there just isn\u2019t the same sort of business knowledge available to parts planners when making stocking decisions.<\/p>\n
Yes, that is a disadvantage, but it also has an upside: there is no need to produce a period-by-period consensus demand forecast with all the work that requires. When planning spare parts, you can usually skip many steps required for a typical manufacturer, distributor, or retailer. These skippable steps include:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n