From Service Noise to Growth Engine: Building a Scalable Aftermarket Supply Chain

A global industrial equipment manufacturer had set a bold target: to grow its Services business by more than 11% year on year over five years. But its aftermarket supply chain wasn’t yet built to deliver it.

Parts availability was inconsistent, directly affecting the uptime of customers’ equipment in the field. Inventory was high but poorly allocated, tying up capital without translating into service. And performance was opaque — a lot of organisational “noise,” but no shared, fact-based view of what was happening or where to act first.

Underneath the day-to-day issues sat a deeper one. The organisation had real strengths — deep technical expertise, high dedication, and a positive culture — but it was set up to operate today’s business, not to design and scale it for the growth ahead. Planning was largely reactive, end-to-end ownership was thin, and the systems and master-data backbone wasn’t yet fit to support significant expansion.

HK-MP partnered with the client on a programme to turn the growth ambition into an operational reality. It was delivered in clear phases.

Phase 1 - Assessment and concept design

We began by cutting through the noise with a data-driven assessment. Working with all sales areas and the Services business in a global workshop, we defined and aligned a future operating model and performance ambition - setting the end-to-end principles, governance, and accountabilities. In parallel, we built a practical KPI framework and the first management scorecards, giving leadership a transparent baseline from which to steer.

We then mapped the priority to-be processes for availability and ordering, scoped the pilots, and aligned every stakeholder end-to-end - from sales areas through to the third-party logistics provider and sourcing. This phase pinpointed the priority improvement areas and quantified the prize.

Phase 2 - Implementation, roll-out and handover

With priorities agreed, the programme moved into delivery across four workstreams:

• Demand planning: deepening and embedding a standardised end-to-end process across regions and the centre, with clear roles, cadence, templates, and hands-on coaching.
• Availability roll-out: extending the new ways of working and the air-to-sea freight model to the remaining key regions.
• Order excellence: prioritising the ERP roadmap to automate order management and introducing visibility and tracking.
• Performance management: extending KPI and dashboard coverage as data connections allow and preparing a structured handover so the client can run the model independently.

The programme has reshaped the foundations of the aftermarket operation — and the business is already growing well ahead of plan.

Against an 11% YoY growth ambition, the Services business is growing at 30% YoY in the first project year, while the operating model, performance management, and core processes that make that growth repeatable are being put in place. Inventory has been held flat even as revenue grows, getting materially more value from existing stock, and a single, agreed scorecard has replaced organisational "noise" with fact-based, end-to-end steering.

On top of the growth already realised in year one, the programme has identified a clear pipeline of further improvement opportunities, across availability, freight, ordering, and planning, to support continued top-line growth while delivering bottom-line savings as they are rolled out.