Spares Management Programs

“5 Signs Your Sparing Model is Costing You Time and Money”

Beyond a data breach, a non-performing infrastructure is the ultimate IT and Engineering nightmare. In an effort to avoid this, most companies have some version of a sparing model or protocol within their organisation. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of those plans are doomed from the start due to lapses in communication and visibility across the entire infrastructure. The inevitable outcome is an inefficient sparing system that consists of ballooning inventory and rising costs that continue to bleed the budget.

XTEL can help you avoid all of these common issues as we employ a hybrid- sparing model along with the implementation of our asset management SaaS, PACT™. The result is minimised CAPEX spend that maximises the useful life of existing hardware and strengthens the integrity and sustainability of your network.

Those 5 Signs are;

• Pit Fall 1) - Operating in a Silo
  • Lack of visibility and communication between divisions cause them to individually operate a self-sustaining sparing model resulting in stockpiling hardware for only what they need.
• Pit Fall 2) - No Reverse Flow of Assets
  • Defective assets accumulate at stocking locations as new parts are purchased to replace them. Often times, assets can be repaired at a fraction of the cost of new and redeployed back into active use.
• Pit Fall 3) - Costly Maintenance Contracts
  • Without a central management system, maintenance contracts lapse or are blindly renewed on equipment that is sitting in a stockpile. Support costs skyrocket and agreements are not leveraged to achieve assets full value.
• Pit Fall 4) - Irregular Cycle Counts
  • Cycle counts are performed manually or irregularly in the field. This results in below average inventory control, leading to shrinkage “write-offs” presenting vulnerability in the sparing model and possibly prolonged customer outages.
• Pit Fall 5) - Logistic Inefficiencies
  • Stocking levels are properly maintained, however not in a location that is optimal to support your installation base. This leads to increased levels of downtime and infrastructure vulnerability as access to spares is delayed.

XTEL provides various levels of Spares Management solutions utilising distribution centre, forward stocking locations, critical on-site sparing, or any combination thereof. Regardless of the solution, you gain measurable cost avoidance at all levels of your network and infrastructure. We do the homework to make sure your Spares Management Programme achieves meaningful improvement in the areas reverse logistics, forward logistics, stocking, configuration, and spares planning. XTEL manages your onsite spare assets as well as the replenishment cycle of the distribution center – yours or ours. XTEL overlays analytics in your programme to ensure forward stocking locations nor distribution centers ever get below the minimum stocking levels and that those levels are never higher than need be to support your infrastructure.

XTEL provides an efficient managed storage solution for your telecoms equipment spare parts. Increasingly customers have been asking XTEL to take control of their technology spare parts management storage because of dissatisfaction with existing solutions provided by the OEM and other technology focused logistics providers. Typically customers have found that so called “dark storage” arrangements whereby equipment is simply stored at a remote facility is inefficient because they have no integrated mechanism to view equipment inventory or to call-back wanted items. Often times these arrangements are very rudimentary and rely on manual searching for wanted items across multiple pallets which is costly and wastes time, particularly for critical spare parts.

Thanks to a combination of XTEL’s considerable Distribution Centers and FSL [Forward Stocking location] warehousing space availability and robust software tools, customers are discovering a vastly superior spare parts management solution at a comparable cost to standard third party logistics providers. Xtel will collect your equipment and then categorise to part code, serial, description and hardware revision level. This spare parts inventory will then be made available to the customer via our user-friendly online asset management reporting tool, ™™, allowing you to view your asset inventory 24/7 and request call-backs.

Many customers also require the item to be tested for functionality and operability efficiency before dispatch and elect to appoint XTEL to resell those spare parts that are excess to requirements in order to generate credits which can be used to fund the programme to purchase other critical spares or to be returned as a cash value. XTEL also consults with the customer to make recommendations to improve efficiencies, cost reduction strategies and execution of the program. We take a historical look at actual consumption by part number and consequent stocking needs and past replacement initiatives of your hardware. That information is coupled with future outlook and deployment plans. Once determining the sparing trend, we are able to determine the optimal stocking amounts of all hardware pieces and keep it that way moving forward; we call this “inventory profiling”; a continuing moving target. More often than not, we can determine that current stocking levels are higher than sparing dictates, which provides an immediate cost savings to customer.

To verify that XTEL has the coverage necessary for your footprint, we provide a detailed report showing the distance from our stocking locations to the customer’s site. Once that report is completed, we then map the data to provide a visual representation for you to review. Business Intelligence tools are provided for ongoing analysis. Utilising this data, we determine best practice and sparing plan to meet your needs in the right geographies.

Throughout the Spares Management process, we employ various different services. Included within this offering are:

• Spare Stocking of Equipment – Strategic FSL, Critical Onsite, and DC
• Equipment Stage and Configuration
• Spares Equipment Software Refresh
• Logistics and Warehousing
• Repair
• Warranty Entitlement
• Refurbishment
• Redeployment
• Automated Reporting
• Inventory Thresholds Management

Please contact the XTEL team to progress your interest @ info@xteltecgroup.com
or call +44 (0) 1372 737260