Geoff Thomas
"Our business is the outsourcing of inventory management - and it's growing at such a rate even I find it hard to keep up with the pace sometimes," says Zivi R Nedivi, Kellstrom Industries' president and CEO.
Kellstrom is a fast-growing company in a fast-growing sector. In the past half year, the Sunrise, Florida-based organisation has acquired Certified, a specialist Lockheed Martin C-130 airframe/engines/parts company, and Solair which concentrates on airline rotables and accessories, to add to the existing engine parts sales and airframe/engine sales and leasing businesses.
"Kellstrom is now a $300-million-a-year business, having grown four-fold since 1997, partly through acquisition but more importantly by growing the market and responding to customer needs. What's more, I'm confident that we'll soon be a half billion dollar business and then double that again within a few years," says Nedivi.
One of the reasons for this meteoric growth is the sea change which Nedivi believe is percolating throughout the commercial - and military - aftermarket.
"The airlines don't want to sit on billions of dollars-worth of inventory, they don't want to be involved in the logistics, they don't want the warehousing and they don't want the tied up capital value.
"In all these things we can help them: outsourcing is the name of the game. We never forget that the right inventory, when linked carefully through strategic alliances, equals sales."
Nedivi is certain that the coming months and years will see far greater impetus in the current trend towards partnering arrangements and strategic alliances with companies such as, AER, Aviation Sales and Kellstrom being the catalysts.
Currently, Swissair is the company's largest customer and the airline appreciates the fact that the integrated imaging system located at Kellstrom's Florida base enables the paper-work for each and every part ordered to be viewed on-line, tracing the full history of the part from when it left the manufacturer.
"The fact that we can do this," says Nedivi, "is what our customers find attractive as it reduces to an absolute minimum the risk of counterfeit parts getting into the system. I believe that the incidence of this criminal activity is decreasing anyway but our systems mean that it's virtually eliminated. If an airline buys a part from Kellstrom, they know where it came from."
Source: Flight Daily News
