A company’s production flow equally relies on assets as well as spare parts stocks management. Equipping maintenance teams with high-performance CMMS software becomes an essential prerequisite since it will allow them to have visibility over their stocks and to gain efficiency. So how can you optimize your stock management and which solution should you turn to to achieve this?
Optimize the availability of parts in stock
To make sure that the production rate is in line with the expectations and needs of your customers, the teams must ensure the availability of both machines and spare parts. Therefore, they need to keep an eye on stock levels.
Indeed, if these are too low, production may be interrupted: as a consequence, the company might incur additional costs and experience significant production losses. If maintenance teams have to intervene on a machine or line and discover that they don’t have the part they need, they will be unable to carry out the repair.
This setback in the plant’s activity irremediably increases the machine’s downtime. In this kind of situation, technicians are forced to call on several services: the purchasing department has to request quotes and order the missing spare parts, the store takes inventory and manages the parts, etc. This long process slows down production. Obviously, teams are thus caught up in time and the company urgently runs the risk to turn to a supplier with little financial advantage. At the same time, delivery times are often long and vary from one service provider to another, thus penalizing production.
If it is necessary to avoid stock shortages at all costs for such obvious reasons, having too high quantities in stock is not the solution either. When stocks are immobilized, they irremediably increase the cost price: in the end, optimized stock management benefits the company as well as the customers and the various suppliers.
CMMS ensure stock levels traceability
Based on this observation, it is essential to guarantee the traceability of spare parts in stock since it will enable the company to ensure the profitability of its production.
Logically, teams must analyze the various indicators, which is normally possible thanks to CMMS solutions. Thanks to next-gen software, such as Mobility Work’s community-based maintenance management platform, users have an analytical dashboard that compiles all their maintenance data.
Mobility Work is provided with an analytic tool to help you analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy
Thanks to this feature, teams can get real feedback on their interventions and follow their machines’ status as well as the interventions carried on them. It’s then up to them to evaluate their needs and control their stock levels accordingly. To do this, several aspects must be taken into account:
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What are the major parts to keep in stock to be sure to have them if a breakdown occurs?
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How many of them do maintenance teams need exactly?
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What would be the delivery times, depending on the company’s activity and the equipment’s state?
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What are the exact storage conditions: how to identify spare parts, what about their obsolescence, what’s the cost for storing them, etc.?
It is precisely to answer these questions that adopting CMMS software will very quickly become indispensable.
Adopting the right solution to optimize stocks management
Maintenance teams work as close as possible to the machines, guaranteeing smooth and fluid production. They must, therefore, be equipped with mobile CMMS software that enables them to work on the equipment as soon as necessary. As we have seen, this software must also offer them certain visibility on spare parts stock levels so that it doesn’t slow down repairs and other activities.
Thanks to Mobility Work, stakeholders are independent on the field and can access the information they need with just a few clicks. As this solution is easy to use, community-based and mobile (therefore available on PC as well as on smartphones or tablets), users exchange information quickly with other technicians through chat. They can view machine data in seconds, thanks for example to the QR codes.
Create your equipment sheets in the maintenance management app Mobility Work in order to trigger tasks and activities
First of all, Mobility Work can be connected to your ERP thanks to its API functionality. This means that certain actions can be automated and that the information that maintenance professionals need is directly visible in their tool. For example, they only need to edit, create or delete parts to ensure that this data is correctly updated in their software, in real-time.
Thanks to this API functionality, the main problem of information exchange between the two systems is solved. Indeed, teams may not know where exactly to find the data they need since it is scattered between the ERP and CMMS. Now, thanks to the item code of each part, teams are able to manage inventory in both tools.
This feature allows technicians to know about the stock levels at any time and to anticipate maintenance activities and repairs. Of course, it fosters optimized stock management, where spare parts are available as soon as field teams need them.
To conclude, stocks management is an essential component of a company’s performance. Poorly anticipated, it has repercussions on your productivity, team activity, and costs. If, on the contrary, it is optimized and the maintenance teams have the right tools (in other words, an adapted solution), inventory management will only be better and technicians and operators will become more efficient.
