Virtual Stock Pooling for Industrial Maintenance Spare Parts 

About the project

The main project’s objectives are to increase the resilience of production sites by increasing the spare parts’ availability, while decreasing the individual stock inventory. By sharing the spare part stock inventories within the community, the members will be able to decrease their stock sizes and increase the reutilisation of spare parts instead of discarding them.  

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models (LLMs), play a crucial role in automating the extraction of relevant information for each spare part. This technology enhances the matching and search efficiency of components, thereby improving the customer experience and streamlining spare all-related processes. 

Challenges

The challenge is to create a Europe-wide platform to enable the efficient exchange of spare parts among various companies. 

There are €3 billion dormant industrial maintenance spare parts in Europe, that are destined for destruction (ranging from 15% to 30% at the company level). 

Simultaneously, industrial buyers struggle to find rare or obsolete parts to maintain their aging equipment.  

The VSPOOL platform will enable companies to share the desired portion of their inventories with chosen peers and vice versa. This will potentially save millions of parts from destruction, while reducing the spare parts stock size and saving costs. 

Solutions

An advanced pooling platform will enable the sharing of spare parts among companies. To enable the scalability of the platform AI-based algorithms, such as large language models, are implemented to automatically extract the relevant information of each spare spart. Additionally, a smart assistant will enable efficient search functionality to facilitate the utilisation of the platform.  

The expected outcome is that clients will be able to identify potential spare parts for their own machines. They may also be able to identify where their stock inventory could be optimised. In addition, they will be able to find and purchase spare parts easily using the platform. 

Expected results

The solution will be deemed successful if companies achieve tangible savings by reducing dormant stock and adjusting their inventory levels through participation in a pooling network.  

Success will ultimately be measured according to the number of licenses sold and therefore the number of users. Kheoos is aiming to sell 20 licenses upon project completion.  

The overarching goal is to increase the resilience and competitiveness of companies by relying on a strong network of companies sharing their spare parts, while reducing raw material consumption and scrap.