Lean spare parts customer enquiry management

Abstract

Companies are constantly increasing their efforts to provide valuable services for their customers. One of the main service areas is spare parts service. To provide spare parts on demand, companies need to effectively respond to customer enquiries. Academic literature on customer enquiry management has mainly focused on integrating sales and production departments to provide reliable lead time and price est imates as quickly as possible. In this study, we focus on an environment where production has been outsourced to a network of suppliers. Existing literature helps us to provide a framework for underlying contingency factors of customer enquiry management, hypothesis for factors determining the strike rate of an enquiry and lean principles that may be applied to improve efficiency in spare parts customer enquiry management.

The research problem of this thesis is that the case company currently faces a larger amount of customer enquiries that is considered conventional for the business, and that there is a lack of understanding the reasons that has caused this situation to occur. The research objectives for the case company were to decrease the amount of unnecessary customer enquiries, to improve case handling efficiency and to improve the strike rate of customer enquiries. The research question of this thesis consists two parts: Firstly, what do the previous enquiry cases tell about customer needs, company performance and areas for performance improvement? Secondly, how can the company improve its take on customer enquiry management by utilizing lean principles?

This thesis is conducted as a data-oriented case study, where data from different databases are combined and analyzed to provide an objective view of the current situation of customer enquiry handling. The analysis is constructed around the lean principle framework that specifies value for the customer and identifies the key value streams and waste on the customer enquiry management process.

The two key findings of this study are the importance of speed of response on enquiry handling and the acknowledgement of high deviation in purchase order lead times. This study also suggests a framework for managing factors that influence customer enquiry management. This thesis suggests that the improvement of customer enquiry management should focus on several factors that influence the company’s ability and commitment to respond to customer enquiries. In addition to the customer enquiry management framework, the case company should negotiate with its suppliers to decrease purchase order lead time deviation and communicate calculated lead time estimations for its customers on e-commerce tool. A framework to evaluate decision making in supplier negotiation decisions is also suggested.