The Importance of Storeroom and Spare Parts with John Ross
Storing the right parts in your storeroom at the right time and in the right quantity is always effective. Storerooms are very important to a company’s survival in the long run so they should be managed at the core competency level of our businesses. The fact is that there is no way your maintenance and reliability operation is going to be successful without an effective spare parts management strategy and well-maintained storeroom. Not every organization is has a good storeroom and there can be a different number of reasons for that. They may be good at other things and they don’t pay attention to spare parts because they have a limited budget or just don’t value it that much.
The reason that spare parts are not always readily available is that people outsource a lot and then they get further away from sourcing the parts in critical situations. That’s why maintaining your own storerooms is the best practice but outsourcing to get your reliability program better instead of cutting costs is good too—only if you are involved and personally invested in it. The storerooms are only good if they are providing you service and convenience. That means that you need to have the critical parts at all times because that directly affects the production. You also need to know about the more and less used spare parts.
Passing on the knowledge of storeroom activities is vital to continue doing the activities as they were done before. The stocking strategy should be focused on parts that are rotating, being touched by operators regularly, need greasing, electronic, and wear parts. This kind of parts should be stocked in the right timeline because they are the critical ones. The stocking level of spare parts is dynamic in the organizations but having a stable strategy is always better for proactive maintenance.
There are three ways to manage your stock and these are min-max, order on request, and economic order quantity. The last one adds the most value to your company for right quantity and time. Then the storeroom needs to be controlled in an easy way that allows maintenance personnel to do their job with convenience and provide them training if necessary to build that kind of culture. It makes the kiting, delivering and stocking way better without that tight security in there. You only stock those parts that are actively on the bill of materials and any other parts should be the responsibility of maintenance department and not the storeroom.
The planners should check the integrity of the bill of materials and then make sure that spare parts are stocked to perform preventive maintenance and they are stocked in a right way. You need to define the critical parts—for the better production—and the obsolete parts very early. After that, you can focus on the important things that are on your road map. Stocking right parts and getting rid of obsolete ones saves cost and improves wrench-time.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio, LLC
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance – Free eBook
- Maintenance Planning & Scheduling: Planning for Profitability Video Course
John Ross Links:
- John Ross LinkedIn
- JRoss@marshall.com for Roadmap and Spares Calculator
- Marshall Institute
- Storeroom Roadmap Blog
- SMRP 2017 Conference
- NC State University
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