New inventory management offers
optimised stock and spares supply
Reduced costs from the need to hold smaller, optimised inventories,
coupled with an assured and timeous availability of spares during
production, are the benefits offered by BATEMAN's new e-spares service,
launched as a joint initiative with Barloworld Optimus and Illustech.
While BATEMAN has traditionally provided a reliable spares and cost-effective
maintenance and after-sales service for its equipment, this partnership
enables it to be one of the few engineering contractors to offer its
clients a comprehensive and optimised inventory-management service
for its projects as well. The service is supported by state-of-the-art
decision support software and ranges from clearing and forwarding,
vendor and commodity management, inbound and outward-bound deliveries,
cataloguing and quality assurance, through to e-procurement, credit
management, on-site inventory management and warehousing.
An important part of the service is Barloworld Optimus's leading
inventory risk management-methodology which enables companies to reduce
their investment in their inventory holding and at the same time improve
availability. Currently, the major cause of holding excessive and
unnecessary inventory is the uncertainty generated by unreliable lead
times after spares orders have been placed, combined with the inaccurate
forecasting of spares that will be needed in production.
The methodology is therefore used to draw up risk profiles for the
production-line spares holding for every single line item, thus ensuring
that the supply of spares matches the demand. Spin-off benefits include
a reduction in the number of emergency orders and the percentage of
direct orders, all of which demand personnel attention and cost.
The service will also make use of full, electronic, spares catalogues
developed by Illustech on the Mincom LinkOne architecture for BATEMAN.
These e-spares manuals are created, updated and viewed electronically
and provide buyers with easy access to single source procurement for
their spares. This is particularly beneficial in remote areas, and
pricing is as good or better than direct purchasing from the original
equipment manufacturers (OEMS). The manuals incorporate three-dimensional
exploded views of the equipment allowing for user-friendly spares
identification and ordering which leads to a significant decrease
in incorrect orders that would normally result in extended downtime.
For further information, please contact Paul Davies, BATEMAN Manager,
Spares & After-Sales Services, on +27-11-201-2300 or email betspares@batemanengineering.com.
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