Wherever machines need to be kept running, maintenance departments ensure smooth support. To ensure that they are always ready for action, these departments - such as metalworking or toolmaking - need a stock of recurring maintenance items.
The spectrum of necessary accessories ranges from O-rings to ball bearings, seals or pneumatic components. If the right part is missing, the service cannot be carried out quickly enough - which, in the worst case scenario, results in a production stop. Although even small companies today work with Kanban systems and automated procurement, these so-called C-parts are still procured very traditionally. It is usually the team or department manager who compares the requirements and notes the missing items and the required quantity by hand. The order is often sent to a central procurement department, which in turn accesses catalogs and orders the required item from there. It is no wonder that minor dramas occur when the need for a part is not recognized in time and the maintenance department has to report that the delivery time must be waited for. This is even more explosive in the current situation, as suppliers are often unable to deliver, prices are not transparent and change on a daily basis.
In addition, manual stocktaking ties up personnel: the ordering process takes up valuable time that should actually be spent on maintenance work and thus paralyzes the respective department's ability to act.
The problem
As a rule, companies still use pen and paper for stocktaking. Traditional manual ordering is carried out via SAP. This means that companies only have access to C-parts that are also listed in SAP. Anything beyond this must be ordered via catalogs - which, however, quickly become outdated. There is no overview of the C-parts available and approved by the purchasing department - nor is it possible to compare prices from different suppliers. The centralized approval process via the purchasing department also costs the purchasing department valuable time - and leaves them no room to support the technicians and specialists in the company with advice and provide real service.
The solution
To make procurement truly agile, top companies today use e-procurement platforms that truly support departmental procurement and are easy to implement. The multi-supplier platform from simple system supports the purchase requisition in the ERP system via the so-called Open Catalog Interface (OCI). The ordering process takes place in just three steps: from the request to the approval to the transmission of the order to the respective supplier. The process is fully automated - the order is triggered, the order number is assigned, the account assignment and the transmission of further information such as shopping basket data all take place within the system.
For the maintenance departments, this means that they can simply print out barcodes for the relevant C-parts directly from simple system and stick them on the corresponding shelves or boxes. These barcodes contain all the necessary information that is also stored in the e-procurement platform, such as the supplier article number, the packaging unit or the required order size. Once the barcodes have been installed on the shelves, they can be quickly read using a barcode scanner with a memory function and the stored order quantities can be saved. The information now contained in the barcode scanner is then - quite simply - read out via the ordering platform and immediately placed in the shopping cart. Depending on the authorization, a pure SAP purchase requisition or a complete SAP purchase order can be generated.
The advantages
Ordering via the ordering platform has three key advantages.
- The scanner already captures all the relevant data required for the order - there is no need for additional data entry.
- The automatic capture of data prevents data entry errors - which are all too common when typing.
- The automated process is significantly faster than manual stocktaking - the maintenance department can devote itself to its actual tasks without distraction.
