French Rail Company SNCF Deploys FuturMaster Solution

SNCF, one of the major global passenger travel, freight logistics and transport groups has chosen the ‘Demand Management’ solution of FuturMaster, France’s leading specialist in Supply Chain management software, to pilot the forecast of the replacement parts required for the trains’ maintenance.

FuturMaster’s solution will ensure improved visibility over spare parts needed for SNCF’s rolling stock and should enable the company to improve the performance of its 38 technical facilities responsible for trains’ maintenance and spare parts replacements and to reduce associated maintenance costs through stocks and turnover rate optimisation.

A revision of the forecast processes dedicated to the spare parts as a part of SNCF’s Material Branch Management Action Plan.

In order to optimise the planning and the use of its resources dedicated to the rolling material maintenance, SNCF has decided to change its forecast processes for replacement parts. SNCF Executives intend to implement short and long-term business forecast processes in order to achieve greater insight into the procurement needs for the parts dedicated to train maintenance.

SNCF wanted a flexible and collaborative forecast and demand management solution that would be capable of providing more than 150 collaborators from the various involved businesses a real platform of exchange for the construction of a single, reliable and shared forecast. SNCF’s aim was to implement an efficient tool capable of calculating and consolidating all its replacement parts requirements over a 10-year period.

_“Our Supply Chain purpose is to guarantee replacement parts availability, in order to meet our partners’ requirements who are in charge of the material maintenance. These maintenance operations are necessary to guarantee our clients’ safety and comfort. In order to anticipate these requirements more efficiently, we had to acquire an efficient, collaborative and adaptive tool, capable of supporting the new forecast processes deployments and to integrate the informatics pattern of the Material branch”, _said Servane Morin-Badier, SNCF Business Project Manager.

As the result of a tender, SNCF has chosen to rely on FuturMaster’s skills and expertise. “The profound understanding of the stakes of our business processes from FuturMaster’s team and its capability to offer us much more than just features but a complete solution that was tried and tested to meet our requirements was a decisive element in our decision-making.”, comments Servane Morin-Badier, SNCF Business Project Manager.

_“Beyond our comprehensive understanding of SNCF business expectations for their key activity, we were able to demonstrate that FuturMaster’s solution could be perfectly integrated into SNCF’s informatics landscape; another stake in this project”, _Michel Ramis, EVP Sales & Marketing – FuturMaster.

The close collaboration between SNCF’s and FuturMaster’s teams was divided into different phases – workshops with the users, development and testing phase. The implementation of FuturMaster’s solution was successful, complied with the schedule that was fixed at the beginning of the project and was deployed for all the users of the Material branch’s forecast process for replacement parts.

About SNCF

SNCF is one of the major global groups specialising in passenger travel, freight logistics and transport and is present in 120 countries with a 32.6 billion turnover and 245, 000 collaborators at the end of 2011. Supervisory authorities define the public company’s mission: the rail transport and the management of the infrastructures on behalf of Réseau Ferré de France (RFF – France Rail Network Company). http://www.sncf.com/en/passengers