A contractor running twelve Komatsu excavators on a road project in West Africa had a familiar problem: the dealer could supply everything, but at a lead time that assumed the machine could wait three weeks.
The constraint
Site conditions were abrasive and the maintenance team was small. Undercarriage and hydraulic lines were consuming faster than the planned budget, and every breakdown stopped a chain of work behind it.
What we changed
We built a consumption profile from six months of their maintenance sheets and mapped each line to a reference number. Three things followed:
- A standing stock list of the twelve fastest-moving references, held in Shanghai.
- A consolidated monthly shipment instead of ad-hoc air freight, cutting freight cost per kilogram by roughly a third.
- A photographed inspection record for every line, so the site team could confirm the part before installation.
The result
Emergency air freight dropped from most orders to a handful per quarter. The site team stopped ordering by description and started ordering by number, which removed the most expensive failure mode of all: the right part arriving for the wrong machine.
If you run a fleet of ten units or more, send us your maintenance list — we will build the same profile before quoting.