Service-friendly bundling of requirements

Most people have experienced for themselves being called by a workshop and told that a repair cannot be completed as planned because it has become clear during the job that another part is required. This can easily happen if the Service department has to use exploded drawings in spare parts catalogs to decide which part needs ordering - and which does not. This applies especially when there are also parts theoretically "meant for reuse" but which prove unfit for reuse on dismantling.

In such cases, this often means a car, truck, construction machine, agricultural machine or injection molding machine being out of action for a day (or even several days), sometimes associated with considerable consequential costs (hiring replacement vehicles, low-loader transport from the yard to the construction site, delayed deliveries), with a missing window crank enough to prevent delivery of several dozen trucks just because a seal was missing when the injection molding machine on which the cranks are molded was being repaired.

This is particularly bad news if the manufacturer's Customer Service maintains the machines, especially as this department, in particular, is expected to know the spare parts required and their availability when the service engineer first calls. No matter who performs service or repair work, nothing is more expensive than a missing part. This is why more and more OEMs are switching to working with specialists from Trelleborg Sealing Solutions to compile seal kits, in order to guarantee that no part is missing or the wrong part is purchased in error when the repair is carried out.

A particular benefit experienced by OEMs is that the order process can be completed with just one part number. This saves money as far back in the process as the compilation of spare parts catalogs, but also in administering parts masters and of course in picking. What is more, the availability of kits is much easier to guarantee than that of ten or even twenty individual items. This means that the kits also have an economic advantage: the order value rises above minimum order value and the customer is not paying primarily for the administrative process, but obtains seals for his money - everything needed to repair a defective hydraulic cylinder or a pump.

It goes without saying that Trelleborg Sealing Solutions supply the seal kits in the form of units ready for sale, neutrally packed and thus ready for branding by labeling at the OEM. Alternatively, they can also be ready in the OEM's typical spare parts packaging, either provided or, for large runs, produced on a customer-specific basis. There is also great variation in the type of packaging, ranging from bag packs to folding cartons to modern blister packs. The seal kits can also be labeled for specific customers and have commercially relevant codes (e.g. part cost index) applied.

If such seal kits are assembled, there is another benefit for OEMs - all the seals used in servicing come from known sources and correspond in terms of quality to the brand standard of the machine or vehicle manufacturer. This prevents the use of cloned spare parts. It is a generally-known fact that quality defects in no-name articles of this kind can lead to premature failure which will ultimately be blamed on the machine manufacturer. This problem is sufficiently serious for some automotive and aircraft manufacturers to provide original spare parts with codes which cannot be counterfeited.

Some of our customers even decide in favor of seal kits for original equipment, firstly so that all seals required for building a particular cylinder type, for example, can be delivered with a single order line, but also to make short picking lists out of long ones in the production warehouse, with one item for everything.