Client Reference | J. C. König Stiftung & Co. KG

The right inventory level in the spare parts warehouse can indeed be determined. But only if a consistent data history is available for future demand estimates. 
In 2018 the prerequisites for this were created by Joh. Cuno König Stiftung & Co. KG. from Solingen.
Ever since the family-owned company has been using the GS-Service business management system for the organisation and documentation of products and processes in the area of materials management, many things have come to an end - Slow-moving items in the warehouse, tied-up capital, suboptimal item search, increased travel times and above all the finger-pointing of external certifiers.

Bosch, Leonie, ZF Sachs, Siemens VDO, Haldex and many others are doing it too. They source precision deep-drawn parts from Solingen. 
In Germany's most famous city of blades, sheaths also have a long tradition: J.C. König - when it was founded in 1882 is still a manufacturer of cutlery - has been producing sheaths for eight decades. When it comes to quality management, the team headed by Managing Director Iris König makes no compromises.

What sounds like an advertising slogan for predictive maintenance in November 2018 was only one reason why the company has been setting up its spare parts handling and long term maintenance processes for the future with GS-Service operations management system from GreenGate AG.
The direct cause was an audit for the IATF 16949 certification. The IATF 16949 certification, which is authoritative in the automotive segment and wanted to know exactly: How do the processes in spare parts management work? Is the documentation of repair work on the machines, the tracking of defects in accordance with accident prevention regulations and maintenance processes?
The previous hybrid handling of paper and Excel - the classic - was not sufficient. "That's why, after the initial contact in February 2018, we decided pretty quickly in favour of GS-Service," explains Melissa Jansen, Assistant Head of Production Environmental / Occupational Safety Management.

 

"We have completely rebuilt our spare parts management," explains Melissa Jansen, "first of all we tidied up and got rid of some things. This started with parts that had been in the warehouse storage, but were no longer needed and ended up with components that no one could allocate because they had simply been left there by external service providers. 
The fact that "an external party would not have found anything because there was no system or the storage locations were not listed" also proved to be suboptimal. The physical and digital reconstruction of the warehouse structure with its 700 articles plus small parts was integrated with a new article number allocation, a separation of electrical and mechanical spare parts and the minimum as well as reorder levels stored in GS-Service. 
"Now the process is simply defined", explains Melissa Jansen, "new articles are entered into GS-Service on the basis of a delivery note and our maintenance staff then fill out the withdrawal slip, a small piece of paper on which it is noted what article was withdrawn in which quantity for which machine. Once a week this is then recording in GS-Service and means little effort, especially since the colleagues are needed at the machines all day.