timematters

Time:matters, the service provider for courier, sameday and emergency logistics, which is part of the Lufthansa Group, has gained Siemens Healthcare, a business unit of Siemens AG, as a customer for the time-critical spare parts logistics segment and entered into an according cooperation agreement with retroactive effect from 1 April, 2008. Time:matters has therefore taken on the spare parts supply in the Scandinavian countries, as well as Italy for Siemens Healthcare.

According to time:matters chief executive officer, Franz-Joseph Miller, the increasing need for customised flexible, but at the same time, quick and reliable solutions for spare part logistics, mainly arises from the fact that an increasing amount of branches of industry are, due to cost reasons, abandoning decentralised means of storage in favour of centralised storage. Therefore, Siemens Healthcare has concentrated the approximate 40,000 stored stock items, which must remain available as spare parts for the company’s high-quality products, to just three distribution centres worldwide and a few regional warehouses. Up until a few years ago, the company stored these items in several decentralised warehouses located throughout the world. “It is obvious that over the course of this development, the challenges facing spare parts logistics have significantly increased and will indeed continue to do so,” said Miller.

The ever-increasing importance of after-sales service also contributes to the continual rise in the demand for reliable spare parts logistics solutions. For instance, Siemens Healthcare sends off around 650,000 spare parts and delivers in over 160 countries per year. “The quality of the after-sales service plays a decisive role for us – especially since the delayed delivery of spare parts for many of our products would lead to incredibly high costs associated with downtime and our customers’ dissatisfaction,” said Heiko Ansorge, head of strategic transport management at Siemens Healthcare, Material Logistics.

Dr Frank Debus, vice-president Material Logistics, said: “Centralised storage in the respective time zones constitutes the basis of our global spare parts supply. With the commissioning of time:matters, we are essentially pursuing one goal, to continue to offer our customers an uncompromising and highly-flexible quality of service in the future – in the form of deliveries that are both fast and reliable.”

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