The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations

Dr. Steven Covey is the acclaimed author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His practices – in particular, his seven habits – have influenced many great organizations and highly successful people. With the permission of the Franklin Covey Institute, MRG’s Paul Swatkowski molded the The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to perfectly fit the maintenance world.

In his book, Dr. Steven Covey breaks success in life down to the adherence of these seven habits:

Habit 1 – Be Proactive
Habit 2 – Begin with the end in mind
Habit 3 – First things first
Habit 4 – Seek Win/Win
Habit 5 – Seek first to understand then be understood
Habit 6 – Synergize
Habit 7 – Sharpen the Saw

These Habits not only apply to personal productivity, but to organizational productivity as well. Each of these—and how they relate to maintenance organizations—will be covered in detail within this blog throughout the upcoming weeks.

Stay tuned for Habit 1!

MRO Stock Optimization of Rarely-Used Items

What is the goal of inventory management? The goal is to have the lowest practical level of inventory, and still maintain a very high service level, at the lowest practical cost.

The idea of reducing inventory is a strategic shift and scary for many organizations. Those organizations have relied on unrealistically elevated inventory levels to sustain equipment up-time goals; but they do so at a significant materials and man-power cost.

As asset reliability programs are being adopted by many industrial organizations, inventory optimization or “right-sizing” is being adopted by many of those same organizations who previously relied on elevated inventory levels to mitigate risk of equipment failure.

While there are a number of factors that need to be adopted to completely right-size the MRO inventory, one method of controlling inventory and the related inventory spend is to analyze slow moving, high value parts that account for approximately 80% of the inventory value but 20% of the physical inventory. Historically, these same parts have sporadic usage therefore it is difficult to forecast demand using traditional techniques of Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) and Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP).

To analyze and reset reorder points of these slow moving or “rarely-used” items, a specialized tool is required. One such tool is WebRUSL. WebRUSL is specifically designed to analyze stocking levels of these previously uncontrolled high value inventory items and reset stocking levels or “right-size” based on factors that were overlooked in traditional demand forecast software. WebRUSL is easy to use, inexpensive, and proven to work without any new software or changes to existing systems.