subject: Spare Parts Maintenance for Your Machinery [print this page] One of the most important tasks that go into ensuring that your factory is functioning smoothly is to incorporate spare parts maintenance into your factory routine. Managing your spare parts inventory is very important because you want your employees to know exactly where to look to find a desired spare part in order to quickly fix machine problems. In addition to this, effectively controlling your inventory for spare parts helps in putting together a more effective asset management schedule for your company and factory. If any type of machinery breaks down in the factory, your employees need to be able to find the effective spare part to repair the machinery within a stipulated time. The more the delay in finding and fixing the spare part, the more the downtime for the company grows. This should be avoided because you're likely to end up falling behind on scheduled orders and requests from your clients.
Managing your spare parts may not be as simple as it sounds. Sometimes a factory might have to manage hundreds of spare parts, so placing them in the right place is important. Having a list of all your spare parts and their location in the warehouse can help in reducing the downtime that any machinery will experience. Computers are available to make our work easy nowadays. Storing all the information in a formatted way in your office computer hard drive is a great way to organize your inventory information. This method allows for easy searching through the inventory and reduced time taken to find the spare parts.
Storing more than the necessary spare parts in your factory is not advisable. You should be able to estimate the needs of your machinery and estimate the optimum number of spare parts that you need to keep in your factory. Too many spare parts will only mean more storage space and more inventory maintenance, not to mention that you might end up spending money on parts that you may never use and add to the overhead of your company. If you are no expert on your machinery, then let your engineers decide on the spare parts requirements. Since they know the way the machine functions, they will be able to give you a more accurate estimate of the spare parts that you may require to store.
