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In good hands.
Are you looking for a hassle-free way to store and manage your spare parts? We’d be happy to make the storage capacity at our manufacturing facility available to you. Combined with a long-term supply contract, we can also offer you many other options with significant potential. Depending on the agreement, this allows you to save time and costs for the logistics, procurement, and storage of regularly recurring components such as wall and cover panels for the electric arc furnace.
The storage of water-cooled components must be planned in such a way that the storage functions required by the operation can be realized, particularly with regard to safety functions, e.g., the constant availability of water-cooled spare parts for a melting furnace. By "warehousing and spare parts delivery," we mean the planning of warehouse organization, storage and transport technology, as well as the handling of stock-in and stock-out processes in collaboration with our customers. One of the goals of this systematic warehouse planning is to reduce storage costs for both parties and create additional capacity for you. Furthermore, warehousing can generally help increase the level of mechanization and automation.
Efficient Warehousing
We generally define inventory as the quantity of spare parts available at a specific point in time. In our view, the following special inventory levels are important for warehouse management: minimum inventory, reorder point, current inventory, and maximum inventory.
A minimum stock level (also called safety stock or old stock) is a level that must not be fallen below even under extreme circumstances in order to ensure the availability of spare parts. The minimum stock level varies depending on the component and/or customer. It generally accounts for the risk that certain components are subject to higher wear and tear than others. When the time for a reorder is reached due to a stock-out, a notification is sent to Purchasing regarding the reorder—on demand—with automatic placement.
The maximum stock level is the maximum quantity that can be kept in stock to avoid high costs, large capital investments, and the risks of excessive inventory. Optimal stock levels ensure smooth operations and reduce storage costs. Optimal stock levels should align with optimal order quantities. For cumulative quantities, minimum and maximum stock levels are dynamic values that can be recalculated based on storage capacity. This is because when the production intensity of a melting furnace decreases (increases), the demand for wear parts in the warehouse also decreases (increases) and can even be zero. Therefore, a fixed reporting threshold is not appropriate for the progress rule. However, to detect potential errors or avoid possible bottlenecks, upper and lower reporting limits can be defined; when these limits are reached, a warning is generated so that you can verify whether the line is correct or contains an error (e.g., data entry or calculation requests).
Upon request, we are also happy to calculate the average storage duration, which provides you with information about the situation in the warehouse and the development of tied-up capital in the warehouse. In this way, it shows the average storage duration—and, of course, the capital required for it—as well as the average inventory level. The shorter the shelf life of a component, the better, because inventory storage is costly to operate, takes up space, and can increase the product’s price.
Long-term supply contracts
Therefore, maintenance and spare parts procurement must also adapt to the changing market environment. This includes ever-shorter lead times, higher availability requirements, greater flexibility, in some cases shorter life cycles and requirement profiles, and longer delivery times. The approach of achieving all this by building up reserves inevitably leads to high capital investments and reduced liquidity. On the other hand, ever-longer delivery times make readily available spare parts from inventory indispensable. Conflicts arising from departmental interests must therefore be addressed in advance by the customer.
Is there a risk of production downtime because the water-cooled spare parts currently in use can no longer be welded? Is your own inventory reaching its limits, with the warehouse overflowing with other components and assemblies essential for operations? We are happy to assist you and can arrange a long-term supply contract for external warehousing in Haltern am See, including spare parts delivery. Even if your furnace is getting on in years and lacks spare part drawings, that’s no problem for us: Send us the defective part or bring it to us so we can take measurements. We manufacture the spare parts for you in our own workshop and store them. We’d be happy to provide our technicians, who will remove the defective part on-site and install the new one.
