Stock Audits from SKF’s Brand Protection, an easy solution for verification of products marked SKF, have been delivering massive savings for customers operating in a wide spectrum of industries. Recently, the SKF Brand Protection team assisted three major users of SKF products in South Africa to identify counterfeit SKF products in their production stores. Through the timeous identification of counterfeit products, the potential risk of catastrophic and costly breakdowns was eliminated, subsequently optimising uptime and production for end-customers. 

SKF is globally renowned as a responsible supplier of premium bearing and rotating products, technologies and systems supported by professional OEM after-market services.  The bearing specialist cultivates long-term customer relationships and support SKF products over their complete life-span. The SKF brand is associated with premium quality, reliability and efficiency. 

Conversely, counterfeit products, usually branded to look very similar to SKF products, do not offer the same guarantee of quality, reliability and efficiency as the genuine products and can seriously compromise machine and plant availability. When end-users are under pressure to find products fast due to halts in production to wait for replacements or are under pressure to reduce cost, the temptation is high to make a hasty purchase from any available source in the market. One fake component procured from a seller who is not an Authorised Distributor of SKF can potentially damage large critical machines with extremely costly consequences.  

SKF therefore strongly advises customers to purchase genuine SKF products from SKFAuthorised Distributors. In line with SKF’s compelling narrative on the tremendous risks that counterfeit products pose to manufacturing, production and processing plants, the company is on a resolute drive to eliminate counterfeit products and help customers avoid all the pitfalls of fake product procurement. To achieve this objective, SKF’s specialised Brand Protection team - conducts on-site Audits and Verifications.

Additionally, customers are able to conveniently make use of SKF’s in-house developed Authenticate App (available on android & iOS platform) which provides customers with a user-friendly platform to send product photos via any smart device to SKF specialists for verification of authenticity.The aim of the Brand Protection Audits is to ensure that SKF products used are genuine and there are no surprises during operation. 

These solutions help prevent counterfeit products entering stores and ultimately being used in machinery, potentially leading to exorbitant costs caused by premature breakdowns, unplanned production stoppages, repairs and replacements, with little or no recourse for customers.   

In addition, these audits assist companies in having a better understand of what products they have in stock (genuine or counterfeit). Audits also help to quickly identify main problem areas and SKF’s Brand Protection team is able to provide feedback on improvement measurements, enabling customers to implement better procurement measures, potentially realising massive savings going forward. Audits also educate customers on how to use the SKF Authenticate App. 

Purchasing and using genuine SKF products from well-known, reputable suppliers like SKF Authorised Distributors who are based country-wide, are fundamental to machine and plant optimisation for ultimate peace of mind. The best way to safeguard authenticity is to buy from SKF Authorised Distributors who are based country-wide and can be found on the official SKF website of SKF –https://www.skf.com/africa/en/support/find-a-distributor.