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William Vega's profile image
William Vega posted 06-13-2023 08:46

Hello All,

I have recently started  with a new (smaller family owned company) and as expected came with multiple roles. One of those being complete oversight of the spare parts storeroom. As an Asset Care Manager of 30 years and working for larger companies, there have always been a separate Supply department that handled repair part management so this is fairly new to me. 

My issue amongst many with the repair parts storeroom is that it looks like someone stopped their efforts shortly after starting it. spare parts in our CMMS system aren't named properly or consistent or have the incorrect attributes to describe a part. There was no discipline when adding the storeroom module to the CMMS system. I have noticed that the technicians can spend hours searching for a part, then have to physically find it in the storeroom and look at it to ensure it is the correct part which cuts into my wrench time. 

My immediate goal is to clean up the master data so that technicians can easily find the part and spend less time in front of a PC and more time maintaining assets. My experience with with Maximo in my previous life is that the company had a add-on to name parts before it was added to the master data. This ensured all parts were consistent with the correct attributes. 

I have searched extensively to see if I can find a software package that can be used for spare parts naming with pre-built attributes but have not had any success. I can definitely build my own database but that would take a month of Sundays to complete. 

Are there any MRO or Stockroom software out there that has built in naming convention tools without having to purchase a full suite CMMS system? We do have a robust cloud CMMS but it lacks the horsepower of a storeroom management system. 

Vinay Maithani's profile image
Vinay Maithani posted 06-14-2023 01:44

Technicians spending time to look for spares in their drawers, site stores and company store/warehouse indeed eats into wrench time. 

You may want to reach out to https://pcaconsulting.com/services/inventory-optimization-process/storeroom-optimization/as they have an exhaustive library of best practices, standards and templates to bring methods for organizing master data related to spares. HP Slater is someone in that firm who has been there and done that.

Alternatively if you still want to do things in DIY mode then the resources at ECCMA are a good start. https://eccma.org/resources/esmm-eccma-shared-material-master/. They provide an ISO 8000-120 compliant database of material and service master records used to reduce the cost of onboarding materials and maintaining material master data.

David Thompson's profile image
David Thompson posted 06-15-2023 01:27

Hi Yours is a common issue and is a mine field. I have used a number of companies to support my cleansing projects and have found the quality very poor, and I have also audited many datasets carried out by so called experts. You are lucky that you are using Maximo, as you do not have character length limitations. I have now developed my own tool with many features to streamline the validation and cleansing process and even incudes PICS to show what the item looks like. Currently it holds over 385,000 p/ns and over 3000 templates. There are a number of options to cleansing depending on the current quality and you need to make rules. I do conduct various training courses on all aspects of managing and optimising spare parts incl best practice cataloguing using MS Access. I also have a Linked Group for Optimising Spare Parts (there are two one i manage and 1 the Asian based Training Organiser manages. I have posted lots of ppts, but not recently as I have been quite busy. if I can help, e mail me  at dave@ramsoftuk.com

Jeff Wahl's profile image
Jeff Wahl posted 06-18-2023 12:58

Hi William,

I can help you with that if you're interested in learning a new technique for bringing your spares together..

Jeffrey

Sue Martini's profile image
Sue Martini posted 08-22-2023 11:44

William take a look at The Bearing Expert to assist with your streamlining of bearing inventory and building master database. We have bearing interchange data for over 100 major manufacturers and 400,000 unique part numbers. Can quickly see the manufacturers that cross reference to each other allowing you to organize and reduce inventory costs. Also includes the most comprehensive independent vibration frequency database in the world. Use the free trial and let me know your thoughts.  https://sourceindex.com/trial/

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