Where Are My Parts?Getting the right part at the right time through Inventory Optimization
Most transit maintenance staff will tell you that they could get more equipment in service if they could only get the parts that they need from the Storeroom. And most Materials personnel will tell you that it is impossible to plan or forecast what material that the maintenance people will need next week or next month. This has lead most transit authorities to focus on reacting to the parts shortage and expediting deliveries from vendors.
What most people do not realize is that there is a staggering amount of money invested in transit inventories and that there is a tool to monitor consumption of transit spares and vendor delivery performance. Bombardier's Xtivity Inventory Optimizer (xIO) now gives you the ability to automatically establish Order Points and Order Quantities, allowing for improved parts availability while reducing your investment in inventory.
The xIO is a Web-based decision support service expressly designed for the transit industry. Managing inventory for a transit operation is uniquely challenging because of the great amount of unplanned maintenance activity, the limited visibility of inventory consumption, an abundance of slow-moving or obsolete items, and suppliers with long lead times. There is the continuous balancing act of having parts on hand to keep the fleet operating while efficiently managing your budget and shelf space.
With purchase activities guided by the xIO, your facility increases material availability, reduces inventory investment, reduces storage requirements, and eliminates dead stock purchasing. A further benefit of streamlining your stock on hand is maximizing the warranty recovery on your inventory. Without careful management, items sit in inventory for so long that the warranty expires before the items can be used.
The xIO monitors your facility's purchasing history and supplier delivery performance to recommend order points and order quantities for every Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) that you use. It is specifically designed to manage sporadically moving inventory, which frees your staff from the manual effort of updating ordering values. The Web-accessed PULSE tool provides 16 different reports, providing business intelligence about your inventory investment, obsolete material, excess supply, and items that are in danger of stock-out status. These reports are available on demand, online, and require no report writers or formal training. Every one of these reports can be downloaded to Excel with one click for further analysis.
As the xIO is a web-based application it is able to be implemented in less than a week. During implementation, it is configured to meet your desired performance levels for fill rates and also accounts for contract orders. There are more than 30 separate configuration parameters to fine tune the solution to meet the unique needs of your transit operation.
To read our case study at Adelaide Australia click here. | 
