The function of the initial service is after-sales service, that is, the problem of the product is compensated after the sale, helping the user to repair it in time. For example, if the shoemaker's shoe is broken, send it back to the shoe, and the shoemaker will repair it and let the customer continue to wear it. With the advent of the era of industrialization, the output of products is getting larger and larger, the products themselves are more complex, and the production process is gradually standardized. When a product fails or has a problem, the product is no longer sent to the manufacturing plant for repair and recovery, but has a dedicated after-sales service personnel to come to the door to serve.
The spare parts business is a product of industrial development
The closer the service network is to the user, the faster the service response; professional people do professional things to make customers more satisfied; standardized production ensures the consistency of the same parts on different products, and the service model also changes from repair to finding damaged parts and replacing new parts. This maintenance process is not only faster and more reliable, but also reduces costs and ensures quality.
This change in service model is a product of industrial development. A key element in the maintenance service is the parts, to the product of thousands of parts coding, warehousing, in the maintenance can know which parts are damaged, how many numbers, so as to quickly find the corresponding accessories in the parts warehouse, timely replacement of damaged parts, quickly restore the performance of the product, and gradually form a spare parts business.
The repair and accessories business was originally designed for product warranty, and in the process companies gradually discovered that they could not only profit from the sale of their products, but also benefit from repair services and spare parts sales after the warranty period. Today, the competition of products is becoming more and more fierce, and competitors are better than whose products have better performance and more competitive prices. However, different competitors use different parts, and the parts of competing products may not be able to be installed on their own products, so a certain degree of "protection" has been formed for spare parts, and the competition in the spare parts business is relatively small.
In addition, the value of spare parts is much lower than that of products, customers are less sensitive to the price of spare parts, when they urgently need to restore product performance, and do not care too much about the price of parts, the priority of restoring product performance is much higher, which makes enterprises in the spare parts business may achieve higher profit margins. Therefore, many manufacturers (especially foreign companies) make a lot of money from the parts business.
Until one day, when the number of products is increasing, the profit of accessories is becoming more and more attractive, and many companies specializing in manufacturing parts (to replace original parts) have appeared in the market, which has broken this "monopoly" of manufacturers in the spare parts market.
Initially, the function of the spare parts business was guarantee
Initially, the main function of the spare parts business is guarantee, especially the service guarantee during the warranty period, the timely replacement of damaged parts, the restoration of product performance, and the key word here is "timeliness". To this end, enterprises began to establish parts inventory, because the biggest benefit of parts inventory is to shorten the delivery time and improve timeliness.
Enterprises found that the more timely the service, the more satisfied the customer, the service can make up for the defects of the product, reduce the customer's complaints, and greatly help to enhance the customer's reputation and market share.
In order to ensure the timeliness of service, the requirements of enterprises for parts warehouses are: "what warehouses do customers need", because once there is a shortage of parts, it will often cause customer complaints, affecting product sales and customer satisfaction. Under the guidance of this idea, the inventory strategy of the warehouse supervisor is also very simple, rather than less, put an end to shortages, and make every effort to ensure customer satisfaction.
However, this inventory strategy also brings great drawbacks, the longer the business is operated, the more sluggish inventory in the warehouse. Due to product upgrading, many parts have been backlogged for many years and cannot be sold, many companies do not deal with those sluggish inventory, from the book they did not lose a penny, in fact, sluggish inventory has caused huge financial losses, because these inventory has been difficult to liquidate.
In many enterprises, there is a strange phenomenon: the inventory is getting bigger and bigger, but the shortage of goods is getting more and more serious, the inventory turnover rate is getting lower and lower, resulting in a continuous decline in the return on investment of the company's accessories business, and many bosses are helpless.
With the increasingly fierce competition in the aftermarket business, the profit of the spare parts business is also decreasing, and the gross profit of many spare parts is less than 20%. If the health of the parts inventory cannot be controlled, the enterprise parts business is likely to lose money. Many bosses do not understand the reason, they only see the profits brought by the accessories business, but do not see the loss of sluggish inventory depreciation every year, ignoring the holding cost of parts inventory.
I hope you will think about an important question: if one day you quit the accessories business, at what price can the spare parts inventory in your warehouse be sold? After considering the losses involved, can you still make money?
To improve the efficiency of accessories, you must know what to store
With the increasingly fierce competition for accessories, enterprises can not only consider the security function of the accessories business, but also must consider the operational efficiency of the accessories business, and enterprises must abandon the inventory concept of "what warehouses customers need".
First of all, no one can do "what you want", then the parts inventory will be too large to bear, and the company will not have the financial resources to place so much parts inventory.
Second, even if companies have the financial resources, they should not do it! Because the result of doing so will lead to a huge inventory backlog and waste. Think about it: a 20-ton excavator, there are about 4,000 kinds of parts, of which less than 100 kinds of commonly used maintenance parts and vulnerable and consumable parts, 95% of the parts design life of more than 10,000 hours, what is the warehouse what is there, what is the significance? It took 5 years for the failure rate to rise before certain parts began to be needed, is it wise to place inventory now? Will customers still come to you to buy parts in 5 years?
Third, businesses cannot survive if they are not profitable. The parts business must also consider the return on investment, and must pay attention to the inventory turnover rate, which is an inventory efficiency indicator. When the inventory turnover rate declines, it means that there is a problem with the health of the company's inventory, and if measures cannot be taken to improve efficiency, the company will sooner or later enter the loss zone.
So how do companies know what parts to store? Of course, based on the analysis and mining of inventory history data, simply put, companies need to answer a question: When you need a part today, how long will you get the part? Considering the order cycle and delivery period, if the answer is 2 months, the company must store at least 2 months of parts inventory in the warehouse, plus a certain safety stock (e.g. 1 month) to avoid stock-outs. If the average demand for this part is 20 per month, it is necessary to put at least 60 such parts in the warehouse and replenish the inventory regularly to ensure the timeliness of supply.
Excellent inventory planners must learn to accurately calculate the reasonable inventory of each part, not only to avoid unnecessary shortages, but also to ensure that there is no backlog and sluggishness of parts, which is the challenge posed by modern parts inventory management to enterprises.
If the enterprise still follows the previous method and only relies on experience to do inventory planning, it will not only produce more and more sluggish inventory, causing losses to the enterprise, but also more and more serious shortage of goods, so that customers will complain, and eventually lead to customer loss, this double "blood loss" will threaten the healthy development of the enterprise.
From "what is needed" to "what should be stored", it is the inevitable result of the progress and development of the times, and it is the transformation of enterprises from extensive management to refined management, and enterprises that do not make changes are bound to be eliminated by the times.