Supply Chain Planning in the Spare Parts Industry: Leveraging S&OP to Align Demand with Inventory & Supply Planning : A case study at ABB Robotics Parts & Logistics

As global manufacturing continues to expand and product complexity increases, effective spare parts planning has become more important than ever. Spare parts are essential not only for maintaining equipment uptime but also for ensuring long-term customer satisfaction and profitability. In industries with long product life cycles, after-sales services, particularly spare parts, often provide more stable and higher-margin revenue than new equipment sales. However, spare parts providers face a continuous challenge: balancing high availability with low inventory costs, two fundamentally conflicting objectives. This study explores how Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), a widely used mid-term planning strategy, can be applied to improve Supply Chain Planning in a spare parts context. The focus is on ABB Parts & Logistics, a unit within ABB Group that supplies spare parts for ABB’s industrial robots. Despite the planning challenges it faces, ABB Parts & Logistics currently does not currently use a formal S&OP. To evaluate the applicability of S&OP for ABB Parts & Logistics, the study uses a maturity level framework synthesized from established academic models and applies it through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of ABB Parts & Logistics current SCP process. These interviews made it possible to map ABB Parts & Logistics SCP processes and thereby conduct a structured assessment of their S&OP maturity across six key themes. The results indicate that while ABB performs relatively well in areas related to effectiveness, notable weaknesses remain in efficiency, particularly in how practices are executed. In other words, ABB Parts & Logistics appears to be doing the right things in line with S&OP principles, but not necessarily in the way the literature prescribes they should be done. Based on these findings, the study proposes five actionable steps to improve ABB Parts & Logistics S&OP maturity: (1) appoint formal S&OP ownership, (2) categorize different types of demand, (3) include sales in demand planning, (4) implement an S&OP workbench, and (5) improve planning for product launches. These proposals demonstrate how S&OP maturity level frameworks can be practically applied to identify weaknesses and guide development in spare parts supply chains.