The impact of not holding a required spare part can be massive. Downtime costs often far outweigh the purchase and holding costs of spares and this can lead to holding far more of some spares than is really required. As a result accountants will often target this as an area of easy cost savings. If you want to keep the accountants off your back and maintain control of your spares holdings it is

One of the main short comings that I see in the approach to indirect materials and spare parts management is that many people don’t think past the key decision as to whether to stock or not to stock an item. After they reach the decision to acquire a spare part often little thought goes into working through the best way to acquire that part. Here is a story about one company that decided to take

Last month I wrote about the cost of delaying action when improvement opportunities are identified. My point was that many people only consider the accrual of benefits AFTER they have taken action and not the opportunity cost of not taking or delaying action (e.g. if I can be $100 better off by doing X then it is effectively costing me $100 if I don’t do X). And by the way, if you delay action

Ever had problems locating an inventory item that you just knew was being held somewhere in your system but weren’t sure where? Yesterday I was with a company that had this very problem with a large, engineered component. The maintenance team needed this particular component and they knew that it was being stored at another site but the stores and warehouse management team at that site couldn’t

This 2Minute Tutorial explains the calculation of stock turns and presents 4 common problems with both calculation and interpreting the stock turn ratio.

Maintenance and reliability engineers will happily (well, not happily) undertake a review of spare parts that are not classified as critical, yet they will shy away from reviewing items that are classified as critical. The argument is: ‘the item is critical and so we must stock it’. Thus the classification drives the review action rather than a cost benefit or stocking analysis. But what if the