Open Access

Manoj Malenahalli

• The main objective of this thesis is to find ways to increase customer satisfaction, by finding solutions to reduce the processing time in offer and order generation, and to work on easier steps for the Service and Sales Companies (SSCs) to quote the offers to the end customers; which will help to reduce the overall delivery times in a large spare parts supply business line. SSCs are part of Voith Group, and located worldwide. These SSCs are the first point of contact for the end-customers. Currently, the company is taking a lot of time for generating the parts offer and parts order and there are many reasons that lead to the delay in processing the offers and orders. In this thesis, these points will be highlighted by analyzing the process thoroughly and a valid solution will be found to reduce the overall delay. The objectives of this thesis are also to find the performance gaps or bottlenecks from the case company's spare part supply chain's processes and adequate ways to improve the performance and to remove these bottlenecks, ultimately leading to shorter lead times, better customer satisfaction and more agile spare part delivery process. The possible performance gaps can be revealed by measuring the performance of the supply chain processes with a performance measurement tool that is based on findings from the literature review and afterwards applied in to the case company's processes. The performance measuring tools used in this thesis are On Time in Full (OTIF) and the delay in the offer generation. The outcome of this work will provide the case company some valid solutions to reduce the offer generation and the order confirmation time by analyzing various parameters. A well-defined and standardized World price and delivery time matrix will be created. The pros and cons of this list will be analyzed and new measures undertaken by the company with regard to parts pricing strategy will be discussed.