Daily Archives: May 29, 2013

By Mike Dyson and James Rogers – Years of “thinking lean” led many manufacturers to install systems offering visibility to the flow of direct production parts from suppliers to the assembly line. Very few, however, have had the same discipline or success tracking indirect inventory or maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) data on all the bearings, belts, motors, cleaning supplies, gloves or hair nets required to keep the production line going.

Quite simply, if you can’t be sure about finding the right parts at the right time, you are putting planned maintenance compliance, if not the performance of the whole plant, at risk. Many maintenance technicians address this risk by keeping their own unofficial and potentially unauthorized stores; the practice is so common that many plants have an “amnesty day” when technicians can safely reveal those “private” stashes of parts. more> http://tinyurl.com/q8jaeul