Bombardier Transportation Berlin, Germany WORKING ACROSS BORDERS Bombardier Transportation’s rail transportation business began with a single contract in Canada and has grown into a global pioneer in the industry. Working across many countries, in many different languages and currencies, has its challenges. Above all, employees’ safety needs must be met. Then, local government and jurisdiction requirements must be adhered to; this applies to maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) concerns and also to any original equipment manufacturer (OEM) issues. Finally, the amount of time spent managing the supply chain needs to be kept in check. At many facilities, workers had to walk long distances to get needed supplies, which would cause delays and slow production. Time was spent managing hundreds of vendors and replenishing thousands of part bins. Bombardier Transportation began to address the issue by creating centralized equipment cribs, but processes were still manual. Bins still had to be filled and workers still had to walk to the crib, and once there, materials could sometimes be out of stock. “Some of the problems we were looking to solve were management of inventory, inventory reduction, looking at initiatives for cost reductions, and processes improvement,” said Geraldine Mihalache, project administrator for Bombardier Transportation who takes care of vendor-managed inventory implementation and various suppliers as a commodity buyer. Bombardier Transportation wanted to gain efficiencies and better understand the sheer volume of parts they were buying. They had local distributors in almost every case, which meant the product portfolios were unique for every single facility. The overall goals for Bombardier Transportation were to consolidate everything they were buying, reduce the overall number of Items, and have one shared data system across all sites. ELEMENTS OF EFFICIENCY 24/7 PRODUCT AVAILABILITY Vending ensures workers have critical products available right when and where they need them. REDUCE USAGE Partnering with Fastenal also allowed Bombardier Transportation to reduce the consumption of personal protective equipment (PPE) products and overconsumption of other common parts. VENDOR CONSOLIDATION Combining both the MRO and OEM sides, Fastenal has reduced Bombardier Transportation’s supply base by about a thousand vendors. PRODUCT REDUCTION Fastenal streamlined the number of available products in many areas. For example, Bombardier Transportation had 104 different families of gloves, and Fastenal was able to remove 80 options to get the number down to 24. ONSITE BRANCHES Stocked with consigned inventory and staffed by Fastenal employees, these act as Fastenal stores inside Bombardier Transportation’s facilities and allow their workers to focus on building quality transportation products.
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