How to improve inventory management thanks to a CMMS?

While a company's production flow is largely based on asset management, it also depends on spare parts inventory management. Equip maintenance teams with a CMMS software efficient performance then becomes an essential prerequisite, since it will allow them to have visibility on stocks and to gain in efficiency. So How to improve and optimize inventory management and which CMMS should you turn to to achieve this?

Optimize the availability of parts in stock

To ensure a production pace that meets the expectations and needs of your customers, teams must ensure the availability of machines as well as spare parts. They therefore need to monitor the status of stock levels.

Indeed, if these are too low, production risks being interrupted: this is the assurance for the company to suffer from additional costs and to know production losses consistent. Indeed, if maintenance teams have to work on a machine or a line and if they notice that they do not have the part they need, they will be unable to carry out the repair successfully.

This setback in factory activity irretrievably increases the machine downtime. Faced with this situation, technicians will be forced to use several services: between management by the purchasing department and in the store or even requests for quotes, production is slowed down. Obviously, teams are thus overwhelmed by time and the company, in an emergency, risks contacting a supplier that is not financially advantageous. At the same time, delivery times are often substantial and vary from one service provider to another, thus penalizing production.

If you must avoid at all costs Out of stock For these obvious reasons, having too many quantities in stock is also not the solution. If stocks are thus immobilized, they irretrievably increase the cost of production: in the end, improving inventory management benefits the company as well as the customers and the various suppliers.

Ensure the traceability of stock levels thanks to a CMMS

Based on this observation, it is essential to guarantee the traceability of spare parts in stock since it is it that will allow the company to ensure the profitability of its production.

In this logic, teams must adopt an approach to analyze the various indicators, which is normally possible thanks to your GMAO. Thanks to next-gen solutions, such as the Mobility Work community maintenance management platform, users have an analytical dashboard that compiles all of their maintenance data.

Find an analytics tool in Mobility Work to analyze all your maintenance data and adapt your strategy

Thanks to this feature, teams can get real feedback on their interventions and monitor the condition of the machines and the interventions they required. It is then up to them to do their calculations to assess their needs and control their stock levels accordingly. To do this, several components must be taken into account:

• What are the Major pieces to keep in stock to be sure of having them if a failure occurs?
• Of which quantity Exactly do maintenance teams need?
• What will be the delivery times to anticipate according to the activity of the company and the condition of the machines?
• What are the exact storage conditions : how to identify spare parts, what about their obsolescence, what is the cost of their storage, etc.?

It is precisely to answer these questions that adopting a CMMS software will very quickly become essential, in order to optimize stock management.

Adopting the right CMMS solution to improve inventory management

Since maintenance teams evolve as close as possible to the machines, they are the guarantee of smooth and smooth production and must therefore be associated with the improvement of stock management. They must therefore be equipped with mobile CMMS software that can allow them to intervene on the equipment as soon as necessary. As we have seen, it must also guarantee them a certain visibility on spare parts stock levels so as not to slow down repairs and other adjustments.

With Mobility Work, workers are independent in the field and access the information they need in a few clicks. As this solution is easy to use, community-based and mobile (therefore available on both PC and smartphone or tablet), users exchange information quickly with other stakeholders through chat and can visualize machine data in a few seconds, thanks for example to the QR codes installed there.

Create your equipment sheets in the Mobility Work maintenance management application to trigger tasks and activities

Above all, the Mobility Work software can be connected to your ERP thanks to his API functionality. This means that certain actions can be automated and that the information that maintenance professionals need is directly visible in their tool. For example, they just need to edit, create or delete parts for this data to be properly updated in their CMMS software, in real time.

Thanks to this API feature, the main problem of exchanging information between the two systems is solved. Indeed, teams may not know where to find exactly the data they need since it is scattered between ERP and CMMS. Now, thanks to the article code for each piece, teams are in a position to manage stocks in one tool as in the other.

With this feature, technicians know the levels and can thus anticipate their operations to improve inventory management. This ensures optimized inventory management, where spare parts are available as soon as field teams need them.

In short, the inventory management is an essential component of a company's performance. Poorly anticipated, it has an impact on your productivity, on team activity and on your costs. If it is on the contrary optimized and that maintenance teams have the right tools, in this case an adapted solution, inventory management will only be better and technicians and operators will gain in efficiency.