Leadership in Logistics Education Award In 2012 the Logistics Association of Australia announced Phillip Slater as that year’s winner of the Kim Rothwell Leadership in Logistics Education Award. Phillip Slater is a spare parts management specialist, consultant, author, and Founder of SparePartsKnowHow.com. Kim Rothwell, is a life member of the association and presented the award. […]
MRP Definition
Is the technique known as Materials Resource Planning misunderstood? Well, in the world of materials and spare parts management for maintenance support I certainly think that it is. Here is our MRP definition: Materials Resource Planning (MRP) is a management technique that is used to control the resources and activities required […]
Why MRO and Spare Parts Inventory Management Is Different to Other Inventory
Subject Area: MRO and Spare Parts Inventory The Root Cause of MRO and Spare Parts Inventory Management Problems While each department blames another for this problem the real issue is that they haven’t recognized the root cause: MRO and spare parts inventories are fundamentally different to other inventory types. This means that many of […]
Supply Chain Management Definition
APICS, The Association for Operations Management uses the following Supply Chain Management definition: ‘design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand and measuring performance globally.’ That’s quite a mouthful and many people think supply chain management […]
Spare Parts Inventory Definition
Definition of Spare Parts Inventory The International Accounting Standards define inventory as follows. ‘Inventories’ are assets: (a) held for sale in the ordinary course of business; (b) in the process of production for such sale; or (c) in the form of materials or supplies to be consumed in the production process or in the rendering of services. […]
Excess Spare Parts Inventory: Deal With It
One of the issues that arise with spare parts management in every industry is the management of excess inventory. This is particularly so with engineering spares, used to provide operational support to maintenance and production. With these spare parts there is often a high number of items that are used only infrequently but which may […]
How Squirrel Stores Wreck Your Data
Recently I wrote about the two major storeroom activities that prevent your issues data from accurately representing actual usage. The first of these was the returns-to-store process and you will recall that, despite the impact on your data, if managed well this process can actually help you improve your reliability. As indicated last time, today […]
How Returns to Store Improves Reliability
Recently I was an attendee at a webinar on the interaction between maintenance reliability and the storeroom. This was a free webinar that while free of cost was also free of content! Unfortunately in this case what content was there was also downright misleading because one of their key points was the assertion that companies can […]
The Two Whys of Spare Parts Inventory Management
The Toyota Production System is seen by many as the origin of Lean Manufacturing – an approach to operations management that eliminates waste and as the name suggests aims to operate as lean as possible. According to Taiicho Ohno, the creator of the system, the approach was built upon a root cause analysis technique called […]
The Truth About Long Supply Chains
Recently I visited a company located near Hobart, in Tasmania. Hobart is the southern most capital city in Australia and possibly the world. One of the interesting things about Hobart (from a spare parts inventory perspective) is that it is a long way away from many industrial centres that supply spare parts. For example, Hobart […]