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The Magic Box

Technicians who can be on the road with the right spare parts in their car are a key factor in improving efficiency and service quality. For five months now, elevator maintenance crews in Spain have been equipped with new blue totes that contain the right spare parts for a whole month. The concept is soon to become the global standard.

When an elevator breaks down, it is often due to individual components that stop functioning. The problem: If a service technician doesn't happen to have exactly the right part for the job, he needs to make another trip to the branch's warehouse. If it is not available there, it must be ordered from the factory or a supplier. During this entire time, the unit remains out of order and keeps the customer impatiently waiting.

Spare parts for the next 30 days in the trunk

For about five months now, technicians from 12 branches in Spain no longer face this problem. When they open the trunk of their service car at a maintenance job and check their blue thyssenkrupp totes, they magically contain exactly the spare parts they need for their job. Is this a Magic Box?

Well, the secret of the blue totes lies less in magic than in the power of mathematics. "Prophet," a new inventory management and planning tool, has a mass of data on spare parts used in service jobs. It is operated by the newly established Spares Business Center and calculates which parts are most likely to be needed in the technician´s vans and for which operations for the next 30 days - depending on the route and actual needs for each maintained unit. The totes are then packed by colleagues in a central warehouse, then loaded directly onto the vehicles or placed at pickup points.

In the first pilot phase, 12 branches throughout Spain were connected to the system. The first was in Teruel, followed by others in Toledo, Talavera, Ciudad Real and many more. A total of more than 280 totes are currently in use. But what about the first experiences?

“Being able to pick up the needed spare parts on my route is a clear advantage,” says Enrique Gallegos, a maintenance technician who receives his spare parts at a drop-off point in Alcorisa (Teruel). “With this, I can avoid traveling more than 100 km to reach the branch. This is a lot safer and less stressful.”

Julio Arias is a warehouse technician in San Fernando de Henares. “Thanks to the new facilities and systems here at the San Fernando SBC, we can easily prepare the blue totes with everything our maintenance technicians need to make our customers' lives easier and better,” he explains. “Using these reusable totes, we also contribute to the environment, saving significantly on packaging material."

A fully digitized logistics chain from production to delivery

"Thanks to the blue totes our service technicians get provided with everything they need for their work," explains global project manager Ivo Siebers. "We are proud to have created another smart element in a series of measures that will shape our logistics chain in the field organization over the next few years. Our primary goal remains to offer reliable first-class performance with minimal use of resources. Digitalization and standardization are the tools that help us in achieving these goals.”

The blue tote forms the last link of 19 sub-projects which together provide a continuous digitalized logistics chain from sourcing to warehousing to delivery of the spare part to the service technician’s van. This will also entail an unbroken ordering and offering function. The name given to the project is Spare Parts Business Excellence, or SPBE for short. The elements are rolled out globally in several phases.

This also includes a standardized catalogue, a system that can be combined seamlessly with other IT solutions such as the Service Tool VIEW. Bundling the forces of forward-thinking IoT with the digitalized service supply chain will increase the effects even further. In the future, Prophet will use also the data coming from MAX.

For our colleagues in the OU Iberia pilot, another important milestone lies ahead. In February 2020, thyssenkrupp Elevator will officially open the new spare parts warehouse in Madrid (Spain).

All this is an investment into strengthening our service, increasing customer value by providing faster response times, and ensuring less downtime. We have service at the heart of our business. Because more than half of thyssenkrupp Elevator’s employees are service technicians, offering innovative, digitalized products and services to our customers in over 100 countries.

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