The packaging machine has stopped unexpectedly. A cylinder has broken. The production engineer calls the Customer Service at Harro Höfliger to order the required spare part. But the employee there has bad news: The cylinder no longer exists and the available successor is a few millimeters longer. In order to use it, machine sections have to be converted. This is expensive – and time consuming.
Felix Haberl, Product Manager in the Customer Service department, is responsible for obsolenscence management which he considers a very important tool to prevent, for example, unplanned machine downtimes.
Harro Höfliger wants to protect customers from such scenarios with a new service: The obsolescence management for components that will be discontinued. Felix Haberl, Product Manager Customer Service, explains how it works: “Upon customer request, we will check the entire parts list of a machine for discontinued parts. For each component that is no longer produced, our engineers will search for successor products. The results are classified and categorized accordingly in a table. A basic distinction is made as to whether the parts are still available or can be replaced by a one-to-one successor, or whether minor adjustments or even complete conversions are required.”
Taking action
The big advantage: Thanks to this service, customers can plan and determine the required measures at an early stage. This also became evident in a pilot project with a pharmaceutical company, where Harro Höfliger compiled overview lists for two large lines and then jointly developed the following strategy: It made sense to stockpile individual components that were still available as spare parts.
The Customer Service team creates a systematic overview of the availability of spare parts.
Since other sections of one machine needed to be optimized anyway, a planned conversion with the new product versions was the obvious solution. Felix Haberl summarizes: “This service means an enormous added value for every customer. With this information customers can be proactive and avoid machine downtimes.”