The Future of Spare Parts: Coming Your Way Soon

Meet Barry

Meet Barry: he’s an “Industry Connector” at AXOM (these days we don’t say spare parts manager anymore) working in a factory in the West of Germany. It’s 22nd November 2030, 9:06 am, and Barry’s taken a sip of his first coffee of the day. He walks from his kitchen to his open-plan home office area. “God I needed that”, he thinks, as he slurps away, surveying the virtual overview of the factory floor on the largest of his three monitor screens. He taps his wireless trackpad and scans the three screens he checks every morning, eyes squinted slightly. 49/50 of the plant’s machines are running smoothly: “don’t tell me number 033 is having issues again”, he thinks, mouth hovering before the next sip. No: it’s machine 018. This is unusual, “machine 018 is usually a good ‘un!”, he thinks. 

He moves the mouse over to screen 2 and checks the status on the Fix’r desktop app: all fine there. He looks over the Fix’r operations record. Last night, the app had already identified the problem, a faulty part, and found some options: get the part delivered by midday for more than he’d usually be comfortable paying, or source a part free from another company plant a day’s driving away (“thank the lord for internal pooling”, Barry thinks to himself). Barry rubs his chin. No, not worth waiting, he thinks. It’s Christmas and all machines need to be running at high performance. “Fix’r, process Option 1”, he says towards the computer. 

Meanwhile, Fix’r pops up with his daily “good morning!” overview. Highlighted in yellow, Fix’r warns that machine 42 is likely to need a new Sonic Compressor in approximately 25 days. “Well, what are the options Fix’r?”, Barry asks, perusing a digital twin of machine 42, on which Fix’r has marked out potential weaknesses. “There is one part located in an AXOM factory 500 kilometers away, with a delivery time of approximately 2-3 working days'', Fix’r cheerily (but, admittedly, somewhat robotically) chimes back. “Alright, do it Fixie”, Barry chirps, putting his coffee cup back a little too enthusiastically on a dog-eared cork coaster on his glass desk. 

“Well, that’s the first bit of my day done”, Barry reflects, as he logs into AXOM’s staff wellbeing portal and selects his usual 9:45 am “Yin-Yang” online yoga class. “Fix’r, hold the ship down, I’ll be back in 60 minutes!”, he yells, rolling out his yoga mat...

The Future of Spare Parts: Coming Your Way Soon

Barry’s morning routine may feel like it’s lightyears away, but spare parts management is a hotbed of underground innovation right now. His story offers us only a few insights into how spare parts management could look in the next 10-20 years. New business and operational models are emerging as technological developments and financial pressure shake up how spare parts management is done in the day-to-day.

We’ll sort the hype from true innovation and take a deep dive into what the future of spare parts could look like for your business.

1) Spare Parts as a Service

The subscription model has taken over nearly every area of our lives - from music (Spotify) to fitness (Class Pass) to work (even Microsoft is now doing it!). The spare parts business is no exception. There are two key subscription options for spare parts.

Spare Parts Access as a Service

Here, you pay a subscription fee to have access to spare parts quickly. You still need someone in-house overseeing spare parts, but you no longer need to stock any. Instead, your subscription fee pays a company who owns the parts, or who may themselves contract someone else who does. The aim of this is to stop you from having to invest in spare parts (CAPEX), while also giving you access to a service that probably guarantees a maximum delivery time for critical parts that’s lower than what you’re dealing with now. Moreover, the parts you receive are always the right, best and newest parts. This beats old or even obsolete parts that have been sat on the factory shelves for years.

Maintenance as a service

This model is more or less uptime as a service. What this means is that the company offering the subscription takes care of the whole lifecycle of your machine. So they more or less take over spare parts management for you, as part of a bigger package effectively looking after the overall maintenance of the machine. This service is increasingly offered by the manufacturers of machines, as an extension of the warranty (a bit like Apple Care), but also by other companies.

It’s important to note that this idea is not exactly new: manufacturers and other companies have been doing this for a while now. What’s new is that the machine operators have stopped selling (just) the machine, and are instead selling the output/availability. So, instead of selling a bottling line, the machine builder might now sell uptime hours or even a certain quantity of bottles.