Demand Management
Strategic Planning
It is a key requirement in aviation to be able to forecast, often times months to years in advance, the need for new inventory. Long lead times for certain inventory, large scale MOD campaigns, and budgetary pressures are just a few of the variables that make strategic planning for inventory procurement and stocking a must.
Maintenix tackles these problems head on by managing aggregate demand for materials based on two streams: deterministic and non-deterministic demand. Deterministic demand, also called scheduled demand, refers to the projection of material requirements based on scheduled maintenance. Because Maintenix can project a maintenance schedule arbitrarily far into the future, the software can project scheduled demand meaningfully. Non-deterministic demand refers to part requirements that will arise due to non-routine maintenance. Maintenix is able to forecast non-deterministic demand through consumption history as well as reliability history. Maintenix can then aggregate the two streams of demand into a single gross demand signal.
With the long-term demand signal firmly in-hand, Maintenix can then make strong recommendations as to how best stock your organization – from global reorder levels right down to each individual station’s allocation of inventory.
Tactical Demand
While long-term demand is the key to determining good stocking levels, it is still the case that tactical management of demand is required. Once maintenance (be it scheduled or unscheduled) is assigned to a work location, it is the case that the local materials personnel need to start gathering the materials for the visit.
Maintenix identifies material requirements for all maintenance scheduled to occur at a location, and attempts to automatically allocate and reserve inventory to those requests. Using the powerful configuration management backbone of Maintenix, only material that is allowable (as defined by the IPC) will be reserved. Material control personnel then deal with any items that cannot be automatically reserved by Maintenix (for instance, if the part is not stocked).
The user is then able to work through the best fulfillment strategy in order to supply the material. As Maintenix tracks the progress of fulfillment and associates that progress to the material request, Maintenix knows when the material arrives (and is available) and automatically reserves that inventory to the originating request.
At this point Maintenix can automatically generate a ticket to help the warehouse personnel direct the inventory. In the event that the maintenance activity that requires the parts is imminent, an issue ticket will be generated, allowing the user to issue the inventory right away. Should the maintenance be further out in the future, Maintenix will direct storeroom personnel to bin the inventory by providing a put-away ticket. Through our robust bar coding scheme and wireless capabilities, the processes of binning, picking, and issuing are made simple.
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