Maintenance Spare Parts

Maintenance spare parts are critical. Not having the right parts is a huge problem

Excess inventory?

Parts not there when you need them?

Excess spending on rush orders?

Can’t seem to clear up those “squirrel” stores?

Parts and material problems are complex. They involve stores, inventory management, procurement, and maintenance planning.

Today’s management systems do not integrate those areas properly to ensure high service levels. Maintainers often buy extras and hide them away. That makes the problem even worse. It is a big challenge to solve. 

Inventory reductions up to 30% have been achieved. Stockouts drop. Rush ordering and high delivery costs dramatically reduced. Repair times improve and productive uptime increases!

Stores, inventory management, purchasing, maintainers and production all benefit.

Our team involves a leading MRO Supply Chain consultant, inventory management  specialist, and an analytics team that uses and AI enabled toolset to reveal problems and suggest quick fixes for some of them.

There’s an excellent risk based inventory management software tool for managing all your spares inventory to meet risk tolerances that you specify,

As a part of our “Conscious Asset Model” we evaluate your data to reveal potential spares inventory reductions, items that probably should be part of your inventory, and even items that have been purchased but not used on work orders. Those are likely hidden away by maintainers in shops and elsewhere – off the books.

 

 

MRO Analytics

We include a rigorous analysis of your MRO inventory, purchasing and related maintenance records in the up-front analytics part of our “Uptime Rapid Value Assessment“. After the analytics, our team arrives on site armed with evidence of what is actually happening. We can focus on the processes and behaviors that are leading to your MRO problems and devise workable solutions.
 

What we often see

Some of the issues we see frequently include:
  • Arbitrary min/max levels,
  • Guesses at lead time,
  • Wrong or sub-standard parts bought from low bidders,
  • Excessive reliance on direct purchase,
  • Low inventory turns,
  • Stashes of parts in maintenance shops and elsewhere around the operation, not managed by stores,
  • Excessive premiums and delivery charges due to rush orders.

Underlying problems can stay hidden

Those are all symptoms of some serious problems that stem from poor communications and lack of both process and systems integration! Here are a few white papers dealing with MRO spares from one of our team members – click here.