All supply chains — including the service spares supply chain — have been transformed by the ripple effects of the past few years’ catastrophic events. Stumbling blocks include factory manufacturing supply shortages, cargo capacity shortfalls, rising costs, abrogation of carrier service contracts, labor shortages and delays of all kinds. Cars, computers, MRI machines, telecommunications equipment — and much more — either can’t be manufactured at all or face long production lead times.

Many corporations focus primarily on the sell side of their business, but it’s become essential for business operations to consider service spares logistics, a critical aspect of the supply chain that supports field assets. Downtime for these assets gets very expensive very quickly, yet the service spares supply chain is often treated as an “afterthought.” 

The service/spares/replacement supply chain isn’t as straightforward as the manufacturing supply chain and return on investment, cost of outage, cost of asset downtime and brand impact metrics are often absent. 

However, companies that ignore the service supply chain may be squandering a 30% return on inventory investment annually by not effectively servicing products in the field. Assets may be poorly tracked, improperly positioned to predicted market demand, and reside in suboptimal locations. The result is an inadequately visible inventory pool called on to perform in a highly reactive manner, a far cry from a predictive, analytics-based supply chain. 

This report examines key concepts for using state-of-the-art analytics to transform the global service parts supply chain from a loss leader to a profit center.

Please CLICK HERE to download the special report.