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White paper: MRO Spares Optimisation

The seven "open doors" to success

MRO/spares have a huge impact on the performance of physical assets. Yet, many companies struggle with making real and valuable steps in spares management.

 

Various senior managers in Africa have requested Gordian to provide an overview of the tough lessons to be learned when conducting a spares improvement project. This is a fair request as we did not explicitly touch upon the critical success factors in the white papers yet.

 

With over 4 years of experience in Africa, doing more than 20 spares projects, we concluded the following on the critical success factors:

  • We now have sufficient experience in the African market to credibly say something about these success factors
  • They are partially different from the ones in Europe

 

Hence, this paper primarily focuses on critical success factors in the African market. However we do stipulate the difference from the European market where possible.

 

Why “open doors”? When thoroughly assessing the tough lessons learned it turns out that the origin of project failures seem to be (among others) peoples, responsibilities, IT and culture. Many books on change management reveal exactly the same root causes. So what’s new?

 

Partially, the answer is in the survey as well. It appears that the blockades have a very long-lasting character (even more then 10 years). To us that seems striking. Also solving the specific problems require a tailored approach in the MRO/Spares business. For example, the complexities are huge, necessitating tailored software.

 

So all in all, the root causes may have a generic common flavour. However, given the special required way to solve them as well as the vast amount of interest in the field, we concluded a legitimate request for information that is not provided in recent management literature yet.

 

download publication 2

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Jan Willem Rustenburg
Founding Partner
E-mail us
info@gordian.nl