Subject Area: Know When to Quit Spare Parts Initiatives Quitting is hard. Am I right? I don’t mean quitting smoking (which is hard) or quitting fried food (even harder!). I mean quitting something that you have worked on, even believed in. I am talking about quitting on a project or

Subject Area: Spare Parts Management Policies You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems James Clear, Atomic Habits The cornerstone of a functional spare parts inventory management system is the development of an appropriate suite of policies. These spare parts

Subject Area: Spare Parts Management Silos One feature of the modern corporation is the departmentalization of functions. Companies do this to both create operational efficiencies and manage the span of management control. Thus, most organizations will have, among others, an operations group, maintenance department, storeroom and logistics, purchasing and procurement,

Subject Area: Artificial Intelligence Problems In part one of this series on artificial intelligence I raised the idea that artificial intelligence will not solve your spare parts management problems. In this article I discuss three main artificial intelligence problems.     Artificial Intelligence Problem 1   First, how can we

Subject area: Artificial Intelligence Part 1 What do chat bots, self-driving cars, and predictive maintenance have in common? They each involve the application of artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years the development of AI has become a hot topic. It seems that AI is being talked up everywhere. At every

What are your options for dealing with excess or obsolete spare parts inventory? Typically there are four: 1. Do nothing 2. Write off and dump 3. Utilize at another site/location 4. Sell       Option 1 achieves nothing, except setting a poor example on what the company expects of

Subject Area: Inventory reduction metric Goodhart’s Law When thinking about the measurement of actions and outcomes relating to spare parts inventory reduction it is worth considering the work of a British economist, Charles Goodhart. In 1975, Goodhart wrote what became known as ‘Goodhart’s Law’. The simplified version states: When a

Subject Area: Spare Parts Inventory Training Why is it, that despite the best efforts of management teams, most spare parts inventories remain bloated with excess, surplus, and obsolete items, while also not providing the level of service expected by the users? The simple answer is spare parts inventory training –

Subject Area: Inventory optimization solution When most people think about spare parts inventory optimization, they tend to think of expensive inventory optimization software that requires lots of training and produces ‘slice and dice’ reports. At least that’s my experience. The problem is that with spare parts inventory nobody really needs

Subject Area: Inventory Sharing Solution For those of you that manage spare parts inventory across multiple sites, how often have you had one site purchase a new spare when another site has an excess quantity of the same item on the shelf? What about experiencing extended downtime waiting on a