A Handy Guide to MRO Optimization

In business, the acronym MRO stands for maintenance, repairs, and operations and refers to a key area within your business. If you’re interested in learning how to optimize your business’ MRO, simply continue reading to discover a few handy tips, which you’ll be able to quickly implement into your business’ supply chain.

A handy guide to MRO optimization:

Make sure that your stock level is manageable at all times:

Many businesses make the common mistake of carrying too much stock. Why is it a bad idea to carry surplus stock? Firstly, you’ll have greater costs such as storage costs and management costs. So instead, it’s a great idea to analyze your orders so that you can have a small amount of additional stock in storage but that you’re not carrying excess amounts of stock that you may end up being stuck with. If certain products don’t sell as quickly as you may expect.

Ensure that your business has spare parts, equipment, and tools on hand for emergencies:

It is however important that your business acquires enough spare parts, for your business to run efficiently. As an example, if your business relies on forklifts in your warehouse, to move stock around, it’s a great idea to have a few spare forklifts or spare parts for your forklifts in storage. So that your supply chain won’t be negatively affected by any maintenance issues which you may encounter in your business. Also, make sure that your business has all the tools which it needs to run efficiently. Especially if your business runs warehouses, factories, or physical stores which will need to be well maintained.

Consider hiring a third party in order to maintain your specialist equipment:

In order to prevent your employee costs from skyrocketing, it may be a wise idea to hire trusted third parties in order to maintain your specialist equipment such as your machinery and electronics. As your business may not be large enough for it to make financial sense to hire full-time specialists to join your team such as IT experts, engineers, and mechanics.

Materials management:

If you haven’t heard of the concept of materials management, it refers to the act of planning and organizing the flow of the materials which are consumed in your business. For example, it’s important to track the final destination of each material that you order. In one instance, you may receive raw materials at your factory, which will then be turned into a product, which will end up in your business’ distribution center, for online customers to purchase. While other materials may end up in products that will end up in one of your physical brick and mortar shops. So make sure to create charts of how each of your materials will be used within your business.

In conclusion, if you are interested in optimizing your business’ MRO, in order to help your business grow from strength to strength, it’s well worth actioning many of the MRO tips which have been outlined above.

 

Infographic created by WSI, a 3pl distribution company