Service parts management is an integral link in the aftermarket supply chain, but are you making it a profit-center or a cost-center? As companies continue to go global with new customers, suppliers, partners and processes, the competition is intense and your parts planning organization must be top-notch in order to stay ahead of your competition. From planning to pricing, inventory management to forecasting, the Service Parts Management Symposium gives you the tools and strategies necessary to maximize your spare parts organization.

Welcome Remarks

Chairperson’s Opening Address

Steve M. Guthrie Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing Flash Global Logistics

Steve Guthrie is the Senior Vice President for Global Sales & Marketing at Flash Global Logistics, Inc. Steve is responsible for sales, marketing, advertising and client development for Flash on a global basis. Steve brings over 20 years experience in leading sales and marketing teams focused on selling value added services with a career focus on supply chain and logistics.

Steve has extensive experience growing and selling supply logistics solutions starting with over 17 years with Ryder System, Inc. where he ultimately led new business sales for the corporation and served as a corporate officer from his position as Vice President of New Business. Steve spent 3 years at Cendian Corporation a start-up company based in Atlanta, Georgia as Vice President of Sales and Marketing. At Cendian Steve and his team grew the company from a standing start to over $750 Million dollars in revenue. Rounding out Steve’s experience is 3 years serving as a Partner at IBM leading global sales engagements focused on selling Business Process Outsourcing Services to Fortune 500 companies for the Global Services division of IBM.

Aligning Your Service and Support Strategy to Provide Optimal Customer Value

Kate Vitasek College of Business Administration University of Tennessee

The success of your aftermarket business depends on your inventory and
distribution strategies. Do your service support operations match your
customers’ expectations without overspending? In this opening presentation,
Steve lays the foundation to implement the ideal strategy for your company,
from examining your current process to identifying how to add value to your
customers while controlling costs.

• Evaluate historical data to plan inventory needs based on product lifespan
• How and when does the product typically fail?
• What’s the churn on products?
• Accurately forecast your inventory requirements as per customer usage to protect yourself from a high carrying cost
• Develop your inventory distribution network to bring the parts closer to the customer, reducing lead times and transportation costs
• Design for reliability and supportability vs. time to market

*Followed by Interactive Solutions-Defining Breakout Discussion

What is a Solutions-Defining Breakout Discussion?
Following the 25 minute presentation, you have the opportunity to discuss the topic with peers seated at your roundtable, followed by a 10 minute Q&A with the speaker to discuss your findings.

CASE STUDY: Overcoming Cost Pressures When Pricing Spare Parts To Generate Greatest Revenue And Retain Customers

Susan Pawlisheck Director of Global Support Solutions Sales and Marketing Axcelis Technologies Inc

Effectively managing the costs associates with your service parts management
can be a daunting task, especially if you want to remain competitive in a
global and commoditized industry. Cost efficiencies can be achieved through
careful pricing and analysis of your internal and external costs. During this
session, Bob walks you through the actionable strategies for implementing the
best pricing strategy for your organization.

• Assess your internal cost pressures to reduce excess cost in service parts management
• Analyze the impact of external cost pressures
• Evaluate where you can cut costs throughout different phases of the aftermarket supply chain especially in inventory & distribution costs
• Determine how effective your pricing is: How much new revenue are you actually generating?

Defining Best Practices To Parts Inventory Optimization: Ensuring The Right Part Is In The Right Place At The Right Time

Ross Rankin Vice President of Product Marketing Servigistics

Service Parts Management is a critical component of Strategic Service
Management and is best defined as ensuring the right part is available at the
right place, at the right time. This is crucial to the delivery of world-class
service and maximizing revenue, profits and customer loyalty. Service Parts
Management is the linchpin of any effective service operation. During this session, David Stegall shares best practices including:

• Forecasting methodologies
• Managing seasonality
• Implementing parts management technologies and having buy-in across
  the organization

Ideas Xchange
You control your experience. Choose two topics, grouped in either Inventory Optimization or Parts Planning, that are most relevant to your responsibilities, introduce your challenges, offer your perspective to the table and gain from shared insights! Each discussion is led by a knowledgeable moderator who will facilitate the conversation among the participants. You will have the chance to learn from two different roundtables. Get to the core of your mission-critical responsibilities and challenges that you need solutions for.

Inventory Optimization

Table #1: Best Practices In Global Inventory Management To Ensure You Meet Your Customers’ Parts Requirements Every Time

James Verner CPIM, Director of Planning & Procurement Apple Inc

• Examine the impact of your current inventory levels and location on customer satisfaction through heuristic measurements
• Analyze the country and proximity of your depots to the customer to proactively manage distributions costs and export duties
• Review quantity of parts in each warehouse to determine optimal stocking levels to control carrying costs
• Discuss the costs and benefits of inventory consolidation based on ability to meet customer SLAs

Table #2: Developing More Effective Partnerships And Processes With Your Suppliers To Enhance Your Parts Supply Operations

• Assess your relationships with your suppliers to identify areas for improvement
• Implement accountability methodologies to push your organization’s aftermarket service supply chain priorities to your suppliers by:
  • Enhancing communication between suppliers & OEMs
  • Developing benchmarking metrics based on accessibility of spares to clients
• Involve your suppliers in parts planning through the entire product life cycle to create greater efficiencies
• Examine the possibilities for your suppliers to collaborate directly with the customer to conveniently stock parts to reduce product down time

Parts Planning

Table #3: Control Inventory Costs Through Full Visibility And Transparency Into Your Aftermarket Service Operations

Jordan Buser Director of Service Supply Chain Pitney Bowes

• Examine your current level of visibility and transparency: How much do information gaps in inventory management cost you?
• Evaluate the benefits of transparency • Implement systems and strategies to help you determine:
  • Location of your customers
  • Positioning of inventory depots
• Review outcomes of enhanced visibility on inventory management: Have you successfully controlled costs?

Table #4: Integrating Product Development With Service Parts Planning To Achieve Optimal Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

Amos Schneller Director of Customer Support Minntech Corporation

• Examine how your parts planning team and product development currently operate to identify similarities and differences in processes
• Generate management’s buy-in of planned integration through a thorough inspection of the benefits and pitfalls of this process
• Link processes and responsibilities for your product development and parts planning teams to seamlessly support a product throughout its lifetime
• Encourage continuous communication between product development and service parts planning to prevent service gaps

CASE STUDY: Creating A Service Supply Chain Blue Print To Proactively Manage A Product From Roll Out Through End Of Life

Sue Otway Manager of Service Parts Planning IBM

OEMs face significant challenges in keeping track of different products at various stages of the product lifecycle. How can your service supply chain leverage separate functions to improve overall product support throughout the product’s lifetime? In this session, Sue provides you with a blueprint, so you can manage your products from rollout to end of life through collaboration across the service supply chain:

• Involve the service parts organization with product development to improve inventory forecasting accuracy
• Develop service parts supply and reutilization plans to streamline product lifecycle management
• Estimate service parts requirements to end of service, such as calculating last time buy quantities
• Monitor the effectiveness of supply plans and last time buys ensure optimal client and product support

*Followed by Interactive Solutions-Defining Breakout Discussion

CASE STUDY: Improving End To End Parts Management By Effectively Anticipating Customer Demand

Les Schalm Director of Worldwide Support & Logistics EFI/VUTEk

In order to provide the best service possible, you must understand your customers and how they use your products. Are you falling behind and running after your customers to meet their needs, or are you one step ahead of the game? From “knowing your customer” to forecasting parts and developing your distribution networks, Les outlines the service map to help you plan ahead.

• Understand customer current usage of spares to forecast parts demand
• Develop your distribution network according to spares needed based on contractual commitments and historical data
• Empower your inventory team to proactively come up with creative end to end solutions when facing unforeseen dilemmas
• Analyze the results of improved parts management to identify the shortages in service and make additional improvements

*Followed by Interactive Solutions-Defining Breakout Discussion

PANEL: Matching Parts Planning With Your Customer Needs To Accurately Meet Your Service Level Agreements

	Deepak Bhatia Manager, Operations Research/Service Parts Planning AGS Applied Materials
	Amos Schneller Director of Customer Support Minntech Corporation
	Kelly Dudek Senior Vice President Of Operations ExpressPoint

Ensuring you have the right part, at the right time in the right place is the core of your aftermarket success. In order to remain competitive, you need to do this better than your competitors to keep ahead of the pack. Deepak and Amos discuss and debate specific processes you need to have in place to successfully measure your performance in meeting your service agreements.

• Determine your current product requirements to accurately forecast how many parts you need to stock
• Identify customers site locations in proximity to your warehouses to: - Ensure timely distribution - Reduce expedited shipment costs
• Ensure your distribution network supports the install base to meet SLAs and internal KPIs
• Utilizing benchmarks to determine if meeting SLA requirements in accordance with customer expectations

CASE STUDY: Improving Your Parts Planning Operations To Achieve Long Term Product Support

Patrick J. Cabral Director of Global Technical Support, Eaton Corporation

Are you meeting the required SLAs and going one step further to ensure your clients keep coming back? In order to beat out the competition and ensure that your support operations run smoothly, you must ensure that you have the processes in place to support your products long term. In this presentation, Mel defines best practices to help your organization manage your customers and products over the long haul.

• Evaluate support and service requirements for each customer to ensure you have the infrastructure in place to meet SLAs
• Discuss the consequences on customer satisfaction and revenue if you don’t strategize for long term product support
• Develop a plan for last-time buys of parts and market it effectively to your customers so they can plan accordingly
• Provide your customer base with superior alternatives to parts that have been discontinued

Followed by Interactive Solutions-Defining Breakout Discussion

Benchmark Your Service Parts Planning Operations

See how you stack up against your competition in this unique benchmarking session. You come up with the questions that you want answers to. If you are interested in submitting questions, please contact Beth Kuntz at beth.kuntz@wbresearch.com.

Interlog Summer 2008 FedEx Kickoff Reception

In 2006 FedEx hosted the NASCAR Reception, and in 2007 they brought you the FedEx Cup Golf Reception. If you have spent an entire day of listening to case studies and discussions to maximize the productivity of your inventory and service parts operations, or if you just arrived in Las Vegas, be sure to join your fellow Interlog Summer attendees at the Interlog Summer 2008 FedEx Kickoff Reception. Keep your eye out for more information about the reception as the event draws nearer. Kick off Interlog Summer 2008 and enjoy some relaxed networking time with your colleagues, suppliers and peers.