Your spare parts inventory is an area of your facility that can quickly become disorganized and difficult to navigate. In order to run an efficient facility that’s maintaining a high ROI, it’s very important to stay on top of your spare parts inventory and keep everything orderly and organized.
Luckily, we have a big announcement coming soon that will make this task even easier through our CMMS maintenance. Stay tuned to our blog and social media for updates!
Tips for Keeping Your Facilities Spare Parts Organized
For now, there are a lot of things you can do to help get your spare parts in order and keep track of them better. Here are a few tips for organizing your facility's spare parts:
- KISS
You know the old saying “Keep it Simple, Stupid?” That applies to organizing your facility’s spare parts pretty well. Label your parts with only totally completely necessary information. Don’t complicate things with lots of extra text that’s hard to categorize and is probably not actually going to be read by anyone.
- Consistency
Before you start heading out to label all your parts, take a minute to come up with a labeling system that works for you and your maintenance team. The most important thing isn’t really what the labels are, but how consistent they are to each other. When all of the labels are in the same format with the same information, it’s much easier for maintenance technicians to find what they’re looking for when they need it.
If you already have our CMMS maintenance, have a look at the categories that are used in our asset tracking software. With some quick modifications these labels can be used for your spare parts and inventory as well.
- 5S Method
There is a method for organization called the 5S Methodology that can work very well for facilities working to organize their spare parts. The 5 S’s are: Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain (sometimes, a 6th S is added for Safety, which you might find useful). The process involves decluttering, putting everything in order, cleaning and inspecting, creating a consistent process, and developing the self-motivation to keep doing it.
- Accurate Data
Labeling and organizing the parts themselves is one major part of the task of getting your spare parts organized, but it isn’t the whole thing. You also need to keep track of all those parts with data, usually entered on a spreadsheet. You have to make sure that your data-entry process is accurate and consistent with your labeling process, otherwise all of the effort put into the other efforts of labeling and systematizing will be useless when your technicians actually have to look for a part.
- CMMS
With a CMMS in place for tracking your assets, creating work orders, scheduling preventative maintenance, and much more, your maintenance department as a whole will be much more organized. When this happens you’ll have way more opportunity (and a better ability) to get to work on organizing your spare parts inventory.
Remember, keep an eye on for our big announcement coming soon to see how much more CMMS will soon be able to help with parts and inventory.
Interested in seeing how a CMMS can work in your facility? You can easily get a free, live, demo of the maintenance management software. Or you can check out our three Editions and sign up for one of them right here.
.svg){kind=small}