The Bosch Business Unit Packaging delivers advanced packaging machines. These machines form a part of its clients´ production line. Therefore, reliability and availability are of great importance. It is therefore not surprising that Bosch takes many initiatives to continuously improve the service. A recent initiative concerned the On Time Delivery (OTD) of spare parts.

That is why the Executive Board of Bosch decided to conduct a “fact based” study into the areas that impact the OTD the most. Bosch cooperated with Gordian in this research. Via a detailed data and process analysis, we indeed identified the process flaws that really hurt the OTD. A good implementation of SAP was quite helpful in this. Also we frequently organised workshops to validate and refine the results. Moreover we made a joint action plan to really increase the OTD.

The result of this in-depth analysis was that the outbound spares delivery process yielded the most improvement potential. We did not expect that result in advance. Earlier we expected the problem would be more in the complex parts of the supply chain. For instance, in the relationship between spare part sales and spare parts production. After decisively intervening in the delivery process, the OTD visibly increased.