‘Getting It Right’ With Spare Parts Management
Achieving best practice spare parts management process involves the input of many different people and/or departments in an organization. To ‘get it right’ with spare parts for maintenance and operational support you need input from the storeroom (or warehouse), procurement, maintenance, planning, finance, and operations (you may have different names for these functions).
Collating and coordinating the information from all of these sources makes any spare parts inventory management process complex. But is it complicated?
Does this even matter? Is this a difference without distinction?
To answer these questions we need to define both complex and complicated.
Complex Vs Complicated
In my definition, complex relates to the number of components that make up a system. Systems with a lot of contributing components can be considered to be complex. Clearly this is the case with spare parts management process.
Complicated refers to the ‘degree of difficulty’ in solving a problem related to the system. Complicated really reflects the nature of the interaction of the various components.
While complex is a function of the system itself, whether or not something is complicated usually depends on the perception of the observer. We could say that ‘complicated is in the eye of the beholder’ – to paraphrase a famous saying.
This means that something can be complex without being complicated. And that something that seems complicated to one person may not be to another.
So what?
Why This Distinction Matters
I think that this distinction matters because once we accept that spare parts management process is complex, but not necessarily complicated, we can start to look differently at the problems that we need to solve and how to go about solving them.
Being complex tells us that we are facing issues that are not solved simply without reviewing our management policies and processes or without the training and education of our team.
But whether or not a spare parts management process is complicated depends on our experience and frame of reference. As I said, something that seems complicated to one person may not be to another.
In recent times I can think of a number of occasions where the client thought that their spare parts management process issue was very complicated but where I helped them quickly and easily realize that it wasn’t and we then identified a solution.
On one of these occasions the client had been wrestling for months with a spare parts supply chain issue but when we laid it out on a white board and changed the frame of reference the client moved from ‘this thing is complicated’ to ‘wow, its actually rather simple’. We then went on and identified the solution in about 30 minutes.
In another situation a simple flow chart showed that, in an otherwise complicated decision making process, only a couple of decision points made any real difference to the outcome. By understanding those key decision points we were able to simplify the management of the process and ensure appropriate governance of the spare parts decision making.
These results didn’t occur because I am super smart (although I may be!) but because I had a different frame of reference that enabled me to see through the perceived complication. Some might call this experience.
So, is spare parts management complicated?
Only if you want it to be!
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Posted by: Phillip Slater