Five Tips To Optimize Your Inventory Management

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) has grown to become a vital tool for modern-day entrepreneurs and maintenance organizations. One of the more common uses of CMMS is in inventory management and in this article, we will be taking a look at how you can optimize your inventory management. Inventory management is an attempt at having the right stock, at the right place, at the right time and for the right price.

The goal of inventory management is to have the right inventory available so that as little as possible is spent on repairs or improvements.

Maintenance inventory is a more common form of inventory management and involves having assets such as motors, fans, bearings, or filters operate as they should.

There are several steps to managing inventory and a mistake in any of the steps could mean a massive loss in the form of additional expense for parts and storage, disruptions to maintenance schedules, and an unwanted increase in stock count.

There are three significant problems with inventory management, namely having too much stock, too little stock or stock you can’t find. It costs 15% to store or hold inventory over a year and buying other means even more expense. On the other hand, when there’s too little stock creates an immediate problem if a machine or part fails and there’s no replacement on the ground. This downtime could result in loss of revenue and additional expense from rush shipping.

Finally, it is estimated that technicians spend 10% to 25% of their time looking for parts that are not where they should be. Such scenarios increase downtime resulting in losses of hundreds or thousands of dollars which could easily have been avoided.

Now that we have taken a look at what poor inventory can cost you, we would take a look at how these scenarios can be avoided and the inventory management optimized:

Track Parts

Unplanned downtimes can be disastrous, resulting in huge financial losses but an inventory tracking system prevents this, helping you keep track of stock size and location. Proper inventory tracking also checks duplicate orders and therefore, prevents costly overstocking.

Get The Stock Levels Right

Getting the stock count right is essential – there should never be too little or too much in your storeroom. To create a stock level, begin by defining a minimum stock level, which can be done by identifying parts critical for production and the normal use of these parts. If done correctly, you can adjust minimum levels and reorder based on usage.

Reorder As And When Due

Using a CMMS tool like Limble helps, you establish a minimum stock level and receive notifications when parts drop below level. This information can be communicated to the person in charge of logistics, so they make an order. You can also employ Limble in keeping track of all activities related to maintenance, which can come handy at the close of the year.

Eliminate Obsolete Parts

Obsolete parts taking up space in your shelves and cost you money and it gets even worse when they cannot also help with repairs when needed, thereby increasing downtime. By tracking the use cycle of inventory, you can know when you got them and how long they have been obsolete, thus minimizing the capital that’s tied up in unused materials and costly downtimes.

Get A Integrated Integrated System

Having a central system to manage your maintenance goes a long way in helping to make you more effective, improving accessibility, consistency, quality and accuracy. Also, it means you won’t have to train the different departments with different tools, one system does all the work. If you can manage inventory and carry out maintenance with a CMMS software, you would have covered a significant aspect of your business plan.

In conclusion, when inventory is managed well, maintenance improves, and it allows technicians to do their jobs as effectively as possible. However, creating an inventory system takes time and requires a robust process for everything to be in order, which is why productivity hacks like Limble come handy. With the right tool, you can keep your facility running smoothly while saving on cost.