jul

Imagine receiving a call from an expert offering to improve your breathing. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Most would dismiss it, confident in their ability to breathe. Yet, you could be suffering from^[1]:

• Elevated heart rate
• Pain in the neck and shoulders
• Pain or weakness in the chest
• Overall weakness
• Dizziness

Now, change ‘breathing’ to ‘spare parts inventory management’ and reread the first paragraph.

Just as we overlook the nuances of breathing, many also neglect the critical aspect of spare parts inventory management. Use the following telltale symptoms to gauge the effectiveness of your current spare parts inventory management practices:

• An overloaded warehouse
• Insufficient availability of essential items for work or service orders
• A too-high inventory value on the balance sheet
• Many obsolete stocks
• Inefficient supply chain and procurement processes
• A secondary supply chain of non-coded parts

Almost all maintenance, service and supply chain managers I speak to are unaware of their organisation’s incompetence in spare parts inventory management. But many recognise the symptoms mentioned above.

Could these have been caused by poor inventory management? Possibly. The good news is that an expert can assess your current spare parts inventory management practices and tools to identify the root cause behind the symptoms and set you on the way to recovery.

Becoming aware, identifying improvement opportunities, and setting plans in motion to improve your spare parts management could make your work life easier and your company more capable of delivering the needed products and services.

The ultimate aim is to have total control over a continuous improvement cycle in spare parts inventory management since improvements will always be there, resulting in a total absence of spare parts shortcomings, low inventories and low logistics costs. This way of working should become so normal that no maintenance, service, or supply chain manager spends time on these processes.

Consider the significance of this aspect of your operations. Do you have any doubts about your inventory management practices? Pfizer and Bayer did. See how we helped them:

• Increase spare part availability while reducing working capital [here]
• Improve engineers’ first-time fix rate [here]

And just as there are specialists who can help you improve your breathing, there are also inventory management experts who can help you resolve the recognisable symptoms.

But honestly, if you recognise some symptoms of bad breathing habits, first visit the breathing specialist.

_{[1] Improper Breathing and Its Negative Effects on Your Health | Vivos}