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Product Standardization
Product Standardization
Product Standardization
Manufacturers are challenged each day to manage spare parts inventories for the wide range of machinery used to produce their goods. Typical installations will include machinery from around the world including Germany, Italy, Japan, China and North America. The challenge is to find a local distributor that can assist manufacturers in selecting the best brands to standardize on. This is where BDI delivers the value as an authorized distributor for the world's leading brands of industrial components.
One example is a customer which had a large excess inventory problem in their storeroom. BDI worked with them to identify the duplicate inventory. Below is what BDI discovered.
Problem: BDI identified duplicate inventory for bearings across 15 different brands.
- X bearing = brand #1
- X bearing = brand #2
- X bearing = brand #3
- " "
- X bearing = brand #15
BDI also identified a one inch, two-bolt pillow block across 7 different brands with enough inventory to last 10 years.
How does such duplicate inventory happen? Each piece of equipment has a bill of materials for spare parts and each specifies a different brand of bearing. After years of deploying new equipment and retiring old equipment, the inventory ballooned to where it was.
Solution: Working with the customer, the "best brands" were agreed upon to standardize on mounted ball bearings - resulting in significant inventory reduction. In addition, BDI optimized the customer's maintenance process and trained the maintenance teams on proper installation and lubrication, extending bearing life.
The same process has been applied to belt drives, chain drives, pneumatics, couplings, electric motors and speed reducers. Contact your local BDI branch to discuss the benefits of Product Standardization.