Subject Area: Spare Parts Management Collaboration
Collaboration Vs Cooperation
Over the past few years there has been a growing awareness that effective and efficient spare parts management requires the input of people from a number of different departments.
Engineering spare parts inventories are influenced by engineering, maintenance, planners, stores/warehouse, finance, purchasing, operations, and suppliers. It is important that any project, training or program aimed at spare parts management engages with representatives from these groups.
Effective results require spare parts management collaboration.
But what does that really mean in practice?
Often when people are talking about this (or when they write a post!) they use the terms collaboration and cooperation as if they are interchangeable. They are not.
It is easy to see why these two words are used in this way when you do a quick check of the Oxford Dictionary online definitions:
Collaboration: The action of working with someone to produce something.
Cooperation: The action or process of working together to the same end.
Not quite the same but not so different that the practical meaning is obvious.
A More Practical Approach for Spare Parts Management Collaboration
In an article titled, There’s a Difference Between Cooperation and Collaboration, Ron Ashkenas provides a much better insight into the differences. To save you time I will summarize this here.
Cooperation usually relates to well meaning ‘cooperative’ behaviours such as the sharing of information. Essentially keeping others informed about your intent but without alignment of goals.
Collaboration involves ‘making the tough decisions about what to do and not do in order to adjust workloads across areas with different priorities’. This requires the ‘ability and flexibility to align their goals and resources, in real time.’
Using these definitions from the article shows us what goes wrong when companies embark on a spare parts management program without fully understanding the difference.
Without the alignment of goals and performance measures team members end up ‘confusing pleasant cooperative behaviour with collaboration’, says Ashkenas.
In my experience the absence of true spare parts management collaboration means that there is little or no give-and-take between departments and often the information sharing becomes ‘telling’ rather than engaging.
A classic example of this is when procurement’s goal of minimum unit cost conflicts with a stocking goal of not over-ordering. Another example is when little investment is made in maintenance planning yet the storeroom is expected to know what’s required.
A lack of true collaboration often results in people defending entrenched positions and then blaming others for any lack of progress or worse still any problems that arise.
Ashenkas goes on to say that, ‘cross-functional collaboration is easy to talk about but hard to do… if you are able to map out what’s needed and bring the needed parties into alignment you’ll not only make an impact on your organization but begin to develop some important collaborative skills’.
With spare parts management, being efficient and effective means minimizing your inventory investment, while maximizing your spare parts availability. This just cannot be achieved without the true collaboration of the entire team whose actions influence this result.
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Posted by: Phillip Slater