29/05/2013

Boosting Efficiency With Better Stores Management

Efficiency and productivity in your maintenance, repair and operations activities is maximised when you have streamlined stockholding in the storeroom and established a well-documented operating process.

Most industrial companies have engineering storerooms. Often they are still managed today as they were twenty or more years ago.  As a result, they can be inefficient and, in some cases, costing businesses money in terms of poor productivity, high inventory costs and wasted staff time.

This needs to change.  The engineering storeroom - of whatever size - should be managed as a centre of productivity, as a ‘profit centre’ in its own right.  This is achievable through careful planning and organisation, workflow management, inventory control and staff training.

MRO stores are often overstocked, typically because engineers do not know exactly what they are going to need or when, so there is a tendency to keep large numbers of parts in the stores just in case.  Think of these lumps of metal on a shelf as money - piles of five and ten pound notes - and you can see the inefficiency.  Of course, it is wise to maintain fast access to critical and fast-moving items but the items in storage are not always necessary.  Often, the list of spares established when the plant was opened is out of date, as engineers have long since made changes and, indeed, the needs of the plant at large may have changed.  Consequently, it may be that only around 20% of spares move within an 18-month period.  There is also the question of how long it takes to install the parts kept in stock.  You may be storing ‘critical’ items such as large bore bearings, for instance, but if it takes a day to strip the old one out of the machine then it is unnecessary to incur the expense and additional effort of holding them in stock when they could be delivered before the engineers are ready for installation.  

A closer relationship with a supply partner can identify items that are not needed and this is just one way in which improved MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) procurement and stores activity can make significant improvements in both plant efficiency and economy.  By carefully monitoring stores, possibly with the help of an experienced outsourcing partner, a sudden rise in the use of a particular spare part can be prepared for and can even help identify potential problems that are developing on the factory floor.  This knowledge can be applied in conjunction with predictive maintenance procedures to bring significant improvements to production line availability. 

Good store management is critical, as anyone who has made their way to the stores and discovered that an urgently required replacement item is missing or unusable knows only too well.  To avoid costly downtime, vital parts need to be readily available and in good working order.  An easily accessible, well organised, on-site store, full of well-maintained parts, saves time and money.  In contrast, a poorly managed store presents a catalogue of problems; components can end up sitting on the shelf for six months in the wrong conditions until they are in an unusable state, while busy engineers can often forget to update the paperwork when they collect replacement parts, leaving no record that the store item in question now needs to be replaced. 

A good outsourcing partner can evaluate and sometimes redefine what is and is not a critical part, enabling you to operate more compact and efficient stores.  For example, Storeroom Services is a defined function within ERIKS, which now has over ten years of stores transformation and project management experience to draw upon and recently helped a customer to turn around its storeroom operation after it failed an internal financial audit because of issues such as poor storage and lack of documentation.  Following a series of measures including the streamlining of fast-moving stocks and a new storeroom layout using high-grade, pre-galvanised steel shelving, the audit status of the stores was raised from Red to Amber and ultimately Green.

Tel: +44 (0)121 508 6219

About ERIKS UK
ERIKS UK now has eighty eight integrated on site stores and procurement centres reducing the costs of all maintenance and repair products and industrial services. In addition, the company operates nine core competence centres and twenty three fully equipped repair workshops maintaining equipment from electric motors, pumps, gearboxes, generators, transformers through to condition monitoring based preventive maintenance services, such as thermography, air leak surveys and vibration analysis.