The Materials Management (MM) single point lesson allows for the presenter to make a few key points.
First, with the statistics that are given, you can show that storerooms are driven by many different forces to expand. The Fact that both vendors and OEMs trying to sell parts and maintenance crafts personnel trying to ensure they have everything they could ever possibly use drive this expansion. We have to understand two things about this ever-expanding storeroom. First, the parts are not free; it costs money to buy and keep them on the shelf. Second, if you buy it and put it on the shelf, you now have to maintain it to prevent the introduction of defects that cost you production down the road. In the world of truly reliable plants, bad parts are just as bad as not having the part.
Critical spares, which are shown in the attic of the house, should be tagged as such and maintained better than the Christmas lights stored in your attic. If you only look at them when you need them, they will not satisfy your reliability goals.
In order to be a truly reliable plant, you will have to take out the trash occasionally. If your storeroom looks like something from Sanford and Sons, you cannot expect maximum performance. As hard as it is for maintenance people, you need to purge those rusty 21-year old bearings that you are keeping “just in case”. That is the price of reliable equipment.
If you have the benefit of having locally available vendors who will stock or otherwise ensure that the parts can be available in the lead times required, then you can let them deal with the taxes, degradation, damage, security, etc. This is an area that strikes fear in many maintenance guys’ hearts, but is a great way to remove waste, induced failures, and cost from your materials business processes.
I hope you can use this SPL to help your organization understand one more of the key elements in this five part series on the basics of reliability.
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