Komatsu America Corp. last week announced the opening of eight regional parts depots throughout the United States and Canada as part of its ongoing commitment to better serve its customers. These eight depots, in addition to Komatsu's master parts distribution center, are part of Komatsu's mission to expedite parts orders, improve operational productivity and efficiency and minimize customer downtime.
“These parts depots are definitely a milestone but it goes a lot deeper than that,” said Frank Pagura, vice president, North American parts operations. “This is the culmination of three years of planning and restructuring to improve and strengthen our total parts availability and distributor and customer support at all levels.”
With this new comprehensive plan comes a three-tier approach for customer parts fulfillment:
- Komatsu America Corp. will work closely with its distributors to monitor and improve local parts stocking and availability of "on-the-shelf inventory" at the distributor locations. This is to ensure Komatsu and its distributors are optimizing their "common parts" inventory to the best of their customer needs.
- Komatsu America Corp. now brings another layer of support to the parts network with the implementation of the eight regional parts depots. Furthermore, Komatsu has added dedicated and continuous nightly trucking routes between the master parts distribution center, the regional parts depots and the distributor locations.
- Komatsu America Corp. has improved the customer service, technical assistance and response teams as well as increased the inventory levels and parts availability at its master parts distribution center (MPDC). Located in Ripley, Tenn., this facility has 584,000 square feet of inventory space housing 45,000 rack and 180,000 bin locations. The MPDC is operational 24 hours a day Monday through Friday (7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on Saturdays), with call-in service available during all other hours and holidays. Customers always have 24-hour access to parts books and parts ordering at Komatsu's parts website: www.epartscentral.com.
“These new regional parts depots combine for a significant increase in available depot space and resulting in total parts storage and availability,” Pagura said. “This is a huge investment towards meeting our customers' needs. Komatsu is proud to say that if a part is not in stock at a distributors' location, Komatsu's has a dedicated team that will do whatever it takes to deliver the necessary part to the distributors' branch by 7 a.m. the next day.”
Komatsu America Corp. is a U.S. subsidiary of Komatsu Ltd., which is a global manufacturer and supplier of construction, mining and compact construction equipment.
