MRO and spare parts best practices

As competition and technology continue to evolve in today’s industrial and manufacturing industries, companies are faced with the ever-increasing challenge of reducing costs and improving efficiency while maintaining production quality. In this webinar we look at MRO and common scenarios that lead to excessive costs, wasted labor hours, and unnecessary downtime. We explore how proper data management can lead to significant increases in equipment updates and reduce overall inventory carrying cost.

MRO is an acronym for maintenance, repair and operations. The term is used broadly but is generally defined as the equipment used to produce end products. Rebuild kits, spare parts, and lubricants are all examples of MRO. BusinessDictionary defines MRO as:

“Supplies consumed in the production process but which do not either become part of the end product or are not central to the firm’s output. MRO items include consumables (such as cleaning, laboratory, or office supplies), industrial equipment (such as compressors, pumps, valves) and plant upkeep supplies (such as gaskets, lubricants, repair tools), and computers, fixtures, furniture, etc.”

Manufacturing companies often have multiple sites spread across large geographic regions, each with thousands of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) spare parts on hand to keep operations running. In such large organizations, several different employees enter items into various enterprise asset management (EAM) systems at each site, with little or no standard guidelines, and often in multiple languages.

Over time, this lack of standardization causes material data to drift and become inconsistent and inaccurate, resulting in many negative effects that can be felt throughout all units of the business. Creating an effective and organized system to manage and lookup MRO materials helps to reduce costs associated with labor hours spent looking for spare parts, purchasing of unnecessary parts, or excessive downtime.

It’s important to educate staff on the importance of master data management best practices to ensure accurate MRO data. Stage gating, standard abbreviations, and data processing rules helps to prevent inaccuracies in your EAM system.