Deutsche Bahn Cargo X Partium

The Challenge

DB Cargo operates a diverse fleet of vehicles, built across a wide range of years — from post-war locomotives and units inherited from former East Germany to state-of-the-art engines and freight cars acquired in recent years

The complexity and lack of standardization across the fleet make accurate vehicle documentation difficult. Older locomotives are especially challenging, as their records are often missing, incomplete, purchased separately, or manually documented in books and binders.

This makes servicing and maintaining locomotives and freight cars a unique challenge for DB Cargo’s maintenance engineers. Contributing factors include the long distances between workshops, offices, and warehouses, as well as environmental effects on spare parts—such as wear, dirt, and deformation—which make identification even more difficult. As a result, many part searches become long and drawn-out processes.

The Long Road to the Right Part

DB Cargo is dealing with a multitude of trains - and a highly complex part search process. In a challenging environment with time-critical maintenance, even experienced technicians may struggle to figure out the correct material number of the part they are looking for.

1. Technicians start the search
Maintenance engineers begin the search on their own by checking the name plate on the locomotive & train car,

2. Technicians check documentation
Going to the filing shelves and combing through documents and binders,

3. Technicians involve experts
Involving a group leader or foreman if they have any trouble, and then continuing the search as a team.

4. The search continues
If in doubt, additional experts – such as staff in the warehouse – are brought in to help rifle through the ERP system.

5. Things go wrong
The team struggles to find the part in the documentation and reaches out to the manufacturer.

6. When everything else fails
Finally, the part is identified, now the part can be requested from the Warehouse or OEM.

Making a Difference in Reliability

Maintenance is probably the #1 driver to increase asset availability.

Vehicle maintenance is labor-intensive, demands significant infrastructure, and is highly time-critical.

Technicians may have a general idea of the part they need, but they still require the exact material number to request it from the warehouse. The impact on maintenance and fleet operations is substantial: repairs are delayed when parts are unavailable or difficult to identify. As a result, trains and cars occupy maintenance tracks longer than scheduled, delaying work on vehicles that arrive afterward.

All this causes delays that are nearly impossible to make up for in operations.

The Goal

DB Cargo aims to become the largest rail logistics company in Europe and is firmly on a growth trajectory.

This aligns with a broader shift toward rail: the European freight transport market is projected to grow by 30% by 2030.

One key lever for improving on-time service—and, in turn, overall operational performance—is optimizing maintenance processes.

With this in mind, DB Cargo introduced Partium to accelerate part searches. The decision to implement Partium was driven primarily by the solution’s technical maturity.

The Solution

The team initially added approximately 12,000 parts, 50 vehicles, and six maintenance facilities. DB Cargo is now expanding the rollout to include more parts and vehicles, with the goal of covering all 15 maintenance plants.

Search, built for the industry
In the freight environment, spare parts are large and cannot always be captured adequately in photos. They are often dirty, worn, and have few visual identification features that are meaningful. Accordingly, it was important to DB Cargo to roll out a solution that would accommodate these challenges.

Quick Setup
Another benefit in Partium’s favor is its flexibility in terms of the setup: Partium can use a huge range of different data for each search. Because of its non-uniform vehicle fleet, DB Cargo has vastly different degrees of maturity and quality in the documentation of the individual locomotives and freight cars. Partium accommodates this situation by drawing on virtually all of DB Cargo’s available data for the search. This includes: material management lists, material descriptions, substitutes, attributes, SAP numbers, inventory levels, inventory locations, production series, material, standard parts, drawing number, manufacturer, item number, and other information.

Connected to the Warehouse
In addition to the requirements of the part searches, the engineers needed direct access to the inventory locations and inventory levels after identification. The aim of this was to cut the time spent running around and searching in the warehouse.

Implementation

With Partium, DB Cargo streamlined their part search process significantly. DB Cargo initially rolled out Partium at six maintenance facilities where between 35 and 100 engineers work in maintenance.

Find Parts on the Spot
Using Partium, they can search through images, semantic search, and leverage additional search features. Technicians can now reliably identify the part on the spot and access comparable substitute parts.

Access the Inventory
Once they identified the right part, Technicians can access the inventory stock and location of the part in the warehouse.

Digital Parts Requests
Engineers and Technicians can contact the warehouse staff and file the work order to request the part they need from the warehouse.

The Impact

After the implementation of Partium into DB Cargo's spare part search process, the team observed a significant drop in search times for technicians. They also realized that engineers and technicians saved a lot of transit times that were spent going back and forth between trains, offices, warehouses, and experts.

Reducing Search Times
With Partium, DB Cargo's Technicians identify and locate Spare Parts much faster.

Search times are reduced for every single part search. With Partium, Technicians can reliably identify spare parts in a couple of minutes rather than spending 30 minutes searching for them - no matter the condition of the part of the complexity of the search.

Other Benefits DB Cargo observed:

• With Partium, Senior Techicians are faster, Junior Technicians are better supported
• Parts-related processes like parts requests are accelerated as well
• Technicians adopt Partium very well - usage increases dramatically over time