Many organizations struggle to manage maintenance stockrooms effectively, impacting the business’s bottom line.

In organizations with inefficient MRO processes, it’s common to find the site with high levels of reactive breakdowns, maintenance delays due to part shortages, high expediting costs, few if any bill of materials (BOMs), poor planning and scheduling practices, and much obsolete inventory on the shelves where the equipment no longer exists in the plant.

Studies show that over 32% of machine downtime is due to the storeroom not having the right parts and materials.

Isn’t it time to make changes if all of this sounds familiar? Here are some areas many sites could leverage to drive storeroom improvements.

As a longer-term strategy, ensure that a process exists to improve the bill of materials over time.

This effort assists the storeroom and helps technicians and planners as examples. It’s common to find planners spending five hours daily looking for the information to order parts for upcoming planned work.

If the asset hierarchy is developed correctly and work orders are written to the lowest child asset levels, ensure that parts are automatically attached to the child asset’s bill of materials when issued.

Also, ensure that management of change (MOC) processes exist to capture equipment changes and capital project additions from the engineering group.

When equipment is added or changed, it’s a perfect time to create or add to the bill of materials in the computerized maintenance management system’s (CMMS) inventory module.

Interestingly, about one-third of storerooms don’t do cycle counting. Couple that with unattended stockroom access that relies on the “honor system,” and you have a recipe for inaccurate storeroom inventories.

Unfortunately, the “honor system” has long been ineffective. No wonder when a technician needs a part, they order three; one for the machine, one in case that one doesn’t work, and one for what I call “squirrel stores,” aka their stash of parts in the toolbox or locker.

The requested extra parts are due to the lack of trust in the storeroom processes, although the undocumented removal of parts is due to the technicians themselves.

Perform cycle counting every week and chase down the variances. Do this by taking the number of inventory stock-keeping units (SKUs) and dividing them by 52 (weeks in the year).

For example, if you have 5200 SKUs, then count 100 per week.

For organizations that leverage ABC analysis (analysis by SKU value and cumulative issue rates), high-value “A” items can be counted four to six times per year, medium “B” items are counted twice per year, and low-value “C” items are counted once per year.

A suitable inventory management module in the CMMS package will handle the SKU selection for you.

Another simple fix is to ensure that a shelf-life program is in place. All too often, drive belts are hung on pegs on the wall and not rotated.

When the belt is pulled from the peg, UV light and the storage environment, coupled with time, have caused the belt to deteriorate to the point that it fails shortly after installation on the asset. There are a few components to address as part of this fix.

A first in, first out (FIFO) process leverages dates on barcode labels, showing when the part or material was received in inventory. If not using barcoding, then a simple ink stamp set to today’s date is used with another label to show the received date.

When the received parts are added to the storage location, the older parts are pulled to the front, and the new parts are placed in the rear of the storage location.

Continuing with shelf life, a v-belt has a shelf life of three years, depending on the storage conditions. Depending on the manufacturer’s recommendations, greases have a shelf life from six months to two years.

Even a ball bearing sealed in a package has a shelf life. When the lubricating film dries out, the bearing components can brinell due to the metal-to-metal contact, creating flat spots.

The storeroom should have a budget to remove parts that have exceeded their shelf life, but without the date labeling, that becomes indeterminable.

Also, belts are best stored flat on a shelf over being hung from a peg on the wall when possible.

Another mistake that undermines plant reliability is when the technician carries a used part into the storeroom to match up with the stocked item.

They leave the used part in the bin beside where they pulled the new part from. Later, the storeroom clerk sees the misplaced part and puts it into the correct location. Later, the part is removed to replace a broken one, only to find it failed.

With maintenance relegated to the role of part changers in many sites, the same thing happens when they pull multiple parts out of stock to troubleshoot the problem. When a part doesn’t fix the problem, it’s put back into stock.

Unknowingly, the part may have been damaged in the troubleshooting process. Like before, the item is pulled later to fix a failure and discovered to be failed. And if that part has a low min/ max point, another part may not be on the shelf.

While there are many more items to address, the last simple fix for this article is having a PM program for larger rotating spares.

For example, when motors sit for extended periods, the grease can slump in the bearings or dry out. Brinelling can occur, creating flat spots. The motor shaft can rust, or in more challenging environments, corrosion can occur.

An essential PM task for motors is to turn the shaft ten revolutions and stop it ninety degrees from the last position once per quarter. Some CMMS systems are programmed to show the keyway position on the PM work order each time it is generated.

At the same time, inspect the motor for corrosion or the shaft for rust. Use preventative measures to address these issues.

Effectively managing maintenance stockrooms is crucial for maintaining plant reliability and reducing costs. Organizations facing these challenges need to implement changes to improve their stockroom operations.

Education is a critical first step, followed by on-site coaching and storeroom certification. If you need help figuring out where to start, contact me at JShiver@PeopleandProcesses.com.

As a rule, maintenance work is repeatable. The maintenance team may work on a specific pump today and repeat the same job two years later.

Rather than reinventing the wheel (developing the work order tasks steps, reattaching pictures, and locating material numbers as examples) every few years, proactive groups develop reusable corrective job plans in a shared library.

Typically, the library is located in the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and stored in the procedures or job plan (Maximo) library.

This location is also where the preventive maintenance PM procedures are stored. In most cases, the main difference between a PM procedure and the corrective job plan is that the PM procedure is set up to trigger at some scheduled maintenance interval, i.e., every month.

Conversely, the corrective job plan is utilized when corrective action is required, often originating from the PM findings. The maintenance planner is responsible for the creation of corrective job plans.

While every job can benefit from a level of planning, there is a cost to building detailed corrective job plans. To that end, developing detailed corrective job plans is typically reserved for more repetitive complex repairs requiring longer durations and many task steps.

How to Build a Job Plan Library

At the end or the start of the day, the planner should review the jobs awaiting planning or in planning statuses to build a listing of jobs to walk down to capture the requirements. If a job plan already exists for the work, walking down that job is not typically required, hence the term reusable job plans.

More competent planners will lay out the walk-down activities into a route to minimize travel times moving from one asset to the next. The maintenance planner should target spending one-third of the day in the field to accomplish these walk-downs.

The planning group should have developed a “walk down” template to facilitate the capture of the necessary job planning information. The template enables the capture of the task steps, the crafts required, the number of crafts at each task step, and the task step duration.

These durations are summed to determine the total job duration. Other sections of the template enable the planner to document the materials required and any special tools or rental equipment as examples. The planner may draw sketches or take pictures to include in the corrective job plan.

The planner may also meet with the technician to help scope the work activities and receive input on how the technician would approach the work. The collaboration improves the partnership and increases the likelihood of the plan being followed.

Creating a Job Plan Template

Ideally, every site or organization should have a job planning template that is utilized for planner walk-downs and standardized entry. The following items serve as a checklist reference:

• Purpose of the work
• Craft requirements
• Estimated job duration
• Materials and parts required
• Consumables needed (dependent on site/ job)
• Individuals/departments to be notified
• Safety requirements / PPE and related issues
• Special tools and equipment
• Equipment drawings (OEM cut sheets)
• Operation and maintenance manual procedures
• Job step sequence, procedures
• Specifications and tolerances
• Special instructions
• References to craft interactions
• Testing requirements
• Clearing of lockouts
• Notification of work completion
• Cleanup and housekeeping issues
• Return of special tools
• Tag rebuildable items
• Disposal of used parts
• Dispose of waste oil
• Complete the paperwork and turn-in
• Input labor hours
• Feedback to planners

Once the walk-down is complete, the planner returns to their desk to do the detailed planning activities. Here, a template enables standardization from one planner to the next.

Sections of existing job plans may be reused to create parts of the new job plan. For example, a laser alignment procedure may exist, and this item can be cut and pasted into the new job plan document.

The task steps are broken down into logical steps that include precision specifications. These specifications include gaps, fits, clearances, belt tension, bolt torque, etc. Surprisingly, a large percentage of equipment failure is self-induced, upwards of 84%. Providing detailed specifications can help ensure that new defects are not added to the asset.

If materials are required, they are identified and added to the job plan before being requisitioned. OEM cut sheets and pictures can be attached as well. The job plan is named for recall in a manner that enables the use across multiple assets and the ability to be located by any planner, not just the original plan creator.

Remember that planning aims to give the technicians a head start. To that end, a job plan can be created with a minimum of three items:

• Job duration
• Crafts required
• Materials needed

When the planner has thirty jobs to plan for a future week, create all thirty jobs using the minimum above and then plan two or three in full detail. A minimum of two to three fully detailed job plans should be a weekly metric for each planner.

Once the detailed corrective job plan is created, it can be attached to the corrective work order. The work order is placed in the “Ready to schedule” status if no materials are required. Otherwise, the status would be set to “Awaiting materials.”

In all cases, feedback is required from the technicians executing the work. This is especially true for the “minimal” job plans. Ideally, a feedback form exists to capture the technician’s feedback. The feedback should enable the planner to document missing materials, adjust the estimated hours, and improve task steps, as examples.

Organizations often provide training to help the technicians understand their role in the planning and feedback processes to get better results in work order documentation.

Yet, developing the job plan library is one of the hardest to sustain from an implementation perspective. Planners are often doing everything but planning. It’s common to find planners spending up to five hours per day locating parts for future jobs.

Accurate job planning is lost, along with technician feedback for improvement. Why reinvent the process the next time the same or similar jobs are needed on that asset? Building the job plan library is one of the easiest ways to improve maintenance planning and systematically reduce the planner’s effort.