Modern Is Your Storeroom a Pit Stop Or a Supermarket?

Recently I was visiting a facility with a very large spare parts storeroom.  While walking through and understanding their issues it actually felt like I was in the local supermarket rather than in the storeroom of a high tech manufacturing facility.  By that I mean that there were long aisles that were not clearly marked, high use materials were not always near the user's entry/exit, and there were boxes in the aisles waiting to be unpacked.  To make the picture complete there was even a maintenance guy walking up and down one aisle saying, 'Where do they keep the sump pump gaskets!'.

A few days later I was watching motor sport on the TV and, as always, was impressed with the cool efficiency of the pit crews when a car came in for fuel, tires and so on.  Of course a pit crew has it relatively easy because they know exactly what is required at each visit but still it got me thinking about how the storeroom I had visited (and maybe even your own storeroom) could be improved and made more efficient.

As with almost all things in operations, the starting point is to focus on the customer and in this case Maintenance is the Storeroom's customer. 

Storerooms exist to enable spares to be available to the maintenance team so that they can do their work.  Maintenance is the storeroom's customer and the customer will want:

Parts available as per the agreed stocking policy.

Parts in the places that the system says that they are.

Easy identification of parts and their stock codes (assuming that this must be noted when the part is removed).

Quick and easy retrieval of parts.

Most people understand the concepts and relationships between layout and workflow so I won't repeat them here but I will say that that one key to implementing these concepts is to ensure that the layout works for the customer, that is, the maintenance team.

This means that if your storeroom allows direct entry by the maintenance team then the layout should work for them.  Even if you do not allow direct access, the above issues apply because this is what minimizes the time spent by the maintenance team in retrieving parts.  Too often storerooms are set up for the convenience of the storeroom personnel.  The workflow is set up based on their receipt and issue of parts not to maximize the customer outcome.  Sometimes it is appropriate to sacrifice a little of the storeroom time efficiency if it then improves the time efficiency for the customer.

A couple of other techniques and their potential issues are:

Storing items for one type of plant or machine together can seem like a good idea but also can mean that both high usage and low usage items are stored together.  This can then lead to storing other high usage items in a less optimal location because the optimal location is taken up by storing the low usage items together with the high usage items.

Storing all like items together (e.g. bearings) also seems like a good idea but this can result in confusion in parts and numbers, incorrect stocking (similar parts in the wrong bin), problems with returns to store if they are not controlled by the store personnel, and, of course, the co-location of high and low usage items, as mentioned above.

So what is your storeroom, an F1 pit stop or a supermarket?

The closer you can get to being a pit stop the less down time you will have and the more productive your maintenance team will be.