Overcoming Five Major Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) Challenges
M.R.O.?
While it may be a small acronym of only three letters, those three small letters have an oversized impact on whether your plant is successful in its mission or falls short of expectations. MRO, short for Maintenance, Repair, and Operations, forms the heart of any plant’s business strategy. Companies that manage it efficiently tend to come out ahead in the game, while those that don’t often struggle to meet customer orders and stay in business.
Today we’ll look at five MRO challenges that manufacturing and industrial plants confront every day and how they negatively affect maintenance and the warehouse. We’ll also examine a potential solution available today that can empower technicians and warehouse frontline workers in overcoming these problems.
What Is MRO and How Is It Different from Daily Maintenance?
Maintenance is the department plants use to keep production equipment in proper working order and to repair them when they break down. MRO not only includes the maintenance program but goes further. MRO also includes the timely procurement, storage, and issuance of the materials, supplies, and spare parts the maintenance department needs in its daily activities. For small businesses, the maintenance manager oversees the entire MRO process. At larger facilities, the maintenance manager works with the warehouse manager to ensure a smooth MRO process.
Managing maintenance focuses on the current operating condition of a piece of equipment and the issuance of work orders to conduct repairs as needed. MRO encompasses that, as well as purchasing, inventory control, and associated costs. It joins the maintenance department and the warehouse in a single process. This means maintenance’s challenges become those of the warehouse and vice versa. They are no longer independent of each other. Therefore, a problem in the warehouse impacts maintenance and goes the other way, too.
What are some of these MRO issues? We’ll look at those in the coming sections.
Problem 1: Lack of Operational Visibility
Even as we approach the one-quarter pole of the 21st century, too many plants still use manual processes that limit their ability to gather the accurate, up-to-date information needed to make knowledge-based MRO decisions.
Paper-based data collection and sharing processes have many problems. For one, they’re slow. It takes time to compile information and upload it to the back-office system, or worse, shared via a routing system. The data could be out-of-date and potentially useless when a decision maker finally gets access to it.
Paper-based systems are also prone to errors. Mistakes can creep in during the collection process or while uploading data into the back-office system.
Decision makers ought to view paper-based data with a wary eye. They’re getting an old, potentially incorrect view of what’s happening within their facility. Costly equipment downtime can result, jeopardizing revenues and pressuring profit margins.
Poor operational and process visibility is a problem common across all industries. Seven out of 10 companies lack full awareness of when equipment is due for maintenance, upgrade, or replacement due to reactive maintenance practices and paper-based data collection processes.
Problem 2: Reactive Maintenance Processes
In addition to using inefficient manual data gathering and sharing, many plants pair paper forms and checklists with a reactive, run-to-fail maintenance process. Perhaps that’s unavoidable considering the delays paper forms and checklists cause in getting the latest data in the hands of decision-makers for action. It’s hard to be proactive in maintenance when you’re not sure of the current condition of your equipment.
Plants using reactive, run-to-fail maintenance processes suffer many common problems. They typically:
Reactive or run-to-fail maintenance too often results in:
Problem 3: Low Productivity
Maintenance productivity is often poor and typically as low as 20 percent. That means that during a typical 10-hour day, the average maintenance technician only spends two to three hours doing actual maintenance work.
So why is maintenance productivity so low? Don’t worry … it’s not because the technician is surfing social media or taking a nap on company time. Well, not as much as you might fear. Instead, the tech is stuck performing other non-productive tasks, such as traveling to and from the job site, awaiting instructions, getting tools and materials, etc.
In addition, in plants using a reactive maintenance process and paper-based data gathering, technicians manually collect data in the field and bring those papers back to the office to upload them into the back-office system of record (such as SAP or IBM Maximo). This manual data entry process takes technicians away from their primary duties. It also increases the risk of human error and inaccuracy. Finally, it results in higher administrative costs.
Problem 4: Information Silos
As discussed in Problem 1, paper-based, reactive plant maintenance programs hurt visibility into the entire process. Supervisors are stuck in information silos. They have no way of knowing work status or outcome until paper reports are turned in or manually uploaded into the back-office system.
Nor can they share critical information with others in the plant, sometimes even after paper-based reports are made available in SAP or IBM Maximo. That’s because, in plants that utilize mobile-first data collection and sharing systems, those systems come from different vendors and can’t integrate.
This means maintenance departments and spare parts warehouses suffer operational inefficiencies and bottlenecks at a time with efficiency and speed are of utmost importance. Ultimately, thanks to information silos, plants and companies can’t get maintenance issues fixed promptly because:
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Problem 5: Spare Parts Management
Most companies run spare parts inventory and maintenance operations as two different entities. Maintenance managers hand over a list of spare parts required for a job to technicians. But, when the technicians go to the warehouse and find the spare parts are unavailable, it wastes time and delays the maintenance activities.
Delayed critical maintenance activities can cause an unplanned downtime incident, incurring huge losses for the company.
When warehouse managers know about upcoming maintenance activities in advance, they can plan appropriate inventory levels. This helps them not only have the right parts on hand when needed, but it also better controls inventory carrying costs.
A proper maintenance MRO program should integrate spare parts management and maintenance management to maximize efficiency.
How A Connected Worker Platform Can Benefit a Plant MRO Program
A connected worker platform replaces inefficient manual-based processes or integrates the mobile applications of two or more operational groups within a company to provide a single, unified source of accurate, real-time data. This delivers end-to-end visibility enterprise-wide, across departments and processes.
Connected worker platforms offer users:
With a connected worker platform, the maintenance department and the warehouse can digitally communicate and collaborate to ensure spare parts are ready in time for an important project. A connected worker platform also delivers valuable information that supports knowledgeable decision-making. Finally, such a platform is equipped with dashboards to better facilitate certain actions. For more information on one such system, visit?innovapptive.com.
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