There is an old management maxim that says that ‘the good is the enemy of the great’. The way that I interpret this expression is that make real progress with their spare parts inventory management companies need to stop being incremental. This is because incremental activity makes us feel like we are making progress with spare parts management but often holds us back from achieving all that could be achieved.
This is different from the old plan-do-check-act where we could have a plan that is a great leap forward but that needs to be implemented in bite size pieces.
Let me explain my idea of not being incremental with some examples.
- A pharmaceutical facility in North America had a problem with spare parts stock accuracy. Their incremental thought was that they just needed the maintenance team to be more disciplined in writing down their usage. However, an investigation revealed that they had bigger issues that made it almost impossible to get the records right in a timely manner. Fixing these fixed the problem.
- A manufacturer in China had a problem with spare parts squirrel stores. The incremental thought was to increase stocks to allow for the variability the squirrel stores produced. A better solution was to extend the storeroom control through a series of satellite stores, resulting in greater control and significant inventory reductions.
- A chemical processor in the Middle East had an issue with determining spare parts re-order points. When I was demonstrating a logical approach that can be used with existing know how and just a little data one of the maintenance leaders challenged that the technique wouldn’t work for them. He was thinking incrementally from their existing process whereas I was giving them a completely new process. My response was to ask him to test my approach live in the training room using any spare part of his choosing. We did this and he was an instant convert.
The key factor in each of these cases was to stop being incremental and to re-think the process or systems that produced the unsatisfactory results.