Spare part management
Customer
Managing spare parts for a range of forklift trucks is a complex business. Maintaining the correct stock level for a company also requires a lot of warehouse space. Over the past two decades, Unicarriers Spareparts has supplied its customers with a wide range of traction wheels. Each wheel is customised and sold in relatively small volumes.
Keeping a wide range of wheels in smaller volumes has a direct impact on the organisation, involving:
- Extra part numbers
- Need for additional warehouse space, leading to extra storage and handling costs
Wheel characteristics matrix
Vulkoprin analysed the physical properties of the different wheels (e.g. hardness, type of wheel cover, rim dimensions) and then made a matrix of all corresponding wheel characteristics.
Solution
Our engineering team designed traction wheels that unite several physical properties in one and the same wheel. These new wheels result in an optimisation of Unicarriers’ wheel catalogue: fewer wheels that serve a larger group of customers.
By creating this optimised wheel catalogue, we have offered Unicarriers a win-win game for themselves as well as their end customers:
- Ability to lower inventory cost levels: reduction of parts and space
- Shorter delivery times
- Larger volumes and more competitive prices
