Benchmarking for spare parts logistics

This article shows the use of benchmarking for the spare parts logistics in the German mechanical industry (investment goods or capital goods). After pointing out the areas of benchmarking application, the use of total function deployment (TFD) for the evaluation of benchmarking metrics is explained. With TFD customer requirements on spare parts supply and the process structure of spare parts logistics are brought together in quality matrices, which are the bases for the metrics derivation. The last paragraph contains the results of a survey in the German mechanical industry. Concrete values of benchmarking metrics from the questioned companies, belonging to metrics on delivery service, costs of logistics and on materials management, are given. All theoretical and empirical results are drawn from a research project conducted in the Institute of Business Administration/Department of Business Management at Darmstadt University of Technology.