As a plant manager, it is important to recognize effective ways to utilize spare parts efficiently. Spare part inventory management is the foundation for dependable plant operations. And as a plant manager, you should know the process of determining which spare parts you will require for making your system more productive.
Also, you should not forget to consider the quality of the spare parts before investing in them. You should choose quality parts like fanuc parts and fanuc spare parts. And it is best to create a planned approach that provides effective inventory management. Read further to know how?
How to Manage Spare Parts Efficiently?
After analyzing the seven factors below carefully, we can say that considering these tips can help to enhance performance, increase the effectiveness of plant operations, and reduce cost.
1. Operation Strategy
Many businesses adopt a habit of creating an operational plan on the basis of responsive events. The operation strategy needs someone to perform it from a reactive or predictive approach. Here, for performing spare parts management efficiently, you will need to adopt a predictive strategy.
But, completely abandoning a reactive approach is also not an option. The core of successfully managing spare parts lies within the ability to prevent future issues before they occur.
Here are some tips that you should consider for effective inventory management by including operation strategy for spare parts:
- Develop an ability to cover the entire operational scope for the spare part management process. This will include locating and solving significant problems that may arise in the future.
- Use predictive management to help in better usage of resources, reduce the cost, and solve time-related issues.
- Ensure to decode failure patterns as they may help to reveal less visible problems.
- The collection and analysis of data should be relevant for improving your business strategy.
Here are some factors that you can consider while calculating the risk for spare parts:
- Determine the reasons and cost for the shutdown
- Create a cost comparison for purchasing “new vs. old” parts for replacement
- Calculate your firm’s exposure by determining the total cost of one-hour downtime of your firm
2. Effective Inventory Control
Organizing spare parts properly and strongly in secure parts is important to control your inventory efficiently. Proper analysis and review of your storage plus check-out system will reveal a lot about the quality of your inventory control.
Here is what you must do for achieving better control over inventory:
- Develop clear criteria to define, aid, and categorize spares.
- Periodically review all spare parts on different parameters.
- Check if you are holding any excess stock for parts to reduce your overall inventory costs.
3. Stock Parts for New Equipment
We hear company owners often advising that there is no need to invest in spare parts for new equipment. No matter how logical this may sound, it is not at all practical. It is instead a very wrong approach to manage spare parts efficiently.
Because it assumes that the vendor's supply will be faultless and bought machines or parts are good in quality which, however, is not valid in most cases. Thus, keeping a good stock of spare parts is necessary and safe for both new and old machines.
Here are some tips to stock spare parts for new equipment:
- Ask your vendors for a list of recommended critical or sensitive parts of the machines they just sold you.
- Work with the operations division to ensure that the budget includes funds for spare parts.
- Utilize all the available information for improving decisions on parts that are necessary to stock.
Final Words
An accurate and efficient spare part management promotes parts usage to be more responsive and proactive for meeting your operational demands. You can save money by pre-stocking the vital parts of your machines. This will save you plenty of time on non-functioning machines. Make sure you stock quality parts like fanuc parts for machines and fanuc spare parts for safety.