Weathering the Storm of Parts Forecasting

You might imagine a manufacturer of packaging machinery would have their parts requirements forecasting all wrapped up. But for this OEM, producing can decorators and packaging machines for the canning industry, that wasn’t the case. In fact, not only didn’t they forecast their production component requirements from week to week – they couldn’t as their own systems wouldn’t allow it.

To make matters even worse, because there was a perceived limited handle on their production requirements, the company didn’t hold stock onsite. So, whenever an order came in for a machine, the only time you’d see more of a mad scramble would be an explosion in an egg-packing plant, spares can be on a manufacturers leadtimes of 18 months plus.  

The customer knew something had to be done to ensure productivity on site met their customers deadlines, With the relationships built over the customer seen this as an opportunity to review their processes, Which is where ERIKS join the story.

The bearing in the haystack

When you're searching for a needle in a haystack, at least you only have one haystack to look in. And the haystack won't charge higher prices to deliver the needle at short notice.

But when this contract customer received an order for a machine and needed bearings for the job, all they had to help them was a list of parts required and a database of suppliers so the hunt began with the ERIKS team. The customer had no record of which bearings they had ordered previously, or from where, or what price they’d paid for them. Whilst some suppliers took advantage of the customer’s urgent needs, and made hay while the sun shone, ERIKS Bearings and Lubrication division working with the onsite ERIKS team  took a long hard look at the problem and proposed a cost-saving, efficiency-improving solution.

Stock answers

The challenge was to work out how to meet the customer’s forthcoming bearing requirements, when the customer themselves didn’t know what they might be. ERIKS’ solution was three-fold.

And thirdly, an experienced ERIKS dedicated resource moved-in onsite for one day a week, to support the customer in forecasting their manufacturing schedule, identifying their bearing requirements, and planning their component ordering.

Now, with a better view of their possible requirements, the customer now has a critical spares holding on site. At the same time, ERIKS provides local storage of bearings: shortening delivery times and immediately shaving valuable time off the customers production schedule.

Not just supplying: delivering

ERIKS’ expertise goes far beyond supplying the right products at the right time and the right price. Our Bearings and Lubrication Division can call on experienced application engineers, able to look beyond the customer’s order and identify more up-to-date product options and deliver more effective solutions.

By looking closely at the machines the customer is building, ERIKS is able to identify more efficient, more reliable and more cost-effective bearing alternatives to the existing choices. Experience also means we can categorise parts by their criticality or risk of obsolescence, and help the customer to find alternatives which are higher quality, more reliable, and which better meet their needs through shorter lead times or improved technology, for example.

And lastly, ERIKS’ broader industry understanding helps us to identify where the customer’s processes can be improved, to engineer-out the issues. As a result, we’ve helped them improve their forecasting, their ordering and their productivity, as well as the quality and reliability of the machines they produce for their own customers.

So now they've really got the wind behind them.