The Truth About Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO)

Like many other maintenance professionals, I enjoy fixing things. Often times on the weekends I can be found servicing a mower or changing the oil in my car.

Sometimes these endeavors take me to the automotive parts store. “Year, Make, and Model?” is all it takes for the parts clerk to zero in on the part I need, whether it’s a simple or complex repair.

By comparison, I visit many plants, and am often amazed at how disorganized, inaccurate, and archaic their MROs (maintenance, operations, and repairs) sometime are.

They often tell me that they don’t have time to fix it, but then I’ll watch mechanics spend hours sifting through junk drawers, many filled with new and used parts, only to come up empty handed. If you are spending more time finding parts than you are troubleshooting and making repairs, you have a major problem.

What Maintenance, Repair, and Operations Can Do for You  

Often plants simply aren’t able to dedicate the resources to build comprehensive bills of materials (BOM), or free up the time to sort through all of the satellite storage areas. The good news is with cloud-based solutions such as L2L's CloudDISPATCH, it has never been easier to turn things around. Now techs can have instant access to comprehensive part data by machine and also be a part of improving the experience with real time BOM capability.

This summer a plant near my hometown hired a summer intern and made it a point to turn things around in their maintenance, repair, and operations. By the end of the summer it was amazing to see the progress. They had over 2,500 of their spare parts inventoried and managed in one system. In addition their inventory was accurate and they even took pictures of the parts so the techs could verify the part from their tablet prior to checking the part out and confirm availability.

All it took was an intern and a couple months, and the experience for the technicians going forward was drastically improved. It’s this kind of step by step change that gets technicians excited and engaged in the progress and direction of a maintenance organization.

Maintenance, Repair, and Operations, Oh My!

Maintenance, repair, and operations is a tough job. There’s a lot of pressure to reduce inventory and increase turns from corporate, in addition to making sure that you’re providing a high level of service to your customer, the production process.

The good news is there are systems that make it easier than ever to leverage and maintain your spare parts with ease. There is no better time than right now to make a change and start turning your MRO around.

See how easy it can be when you schedule a demo with L2L!