This automated “goods to service” system helps to maximize productivity in Motion’s Birmingham distribution center. IMAGE COURTESY MOTION
MAINTENANCE MATTERS Managing MRO effectively can reduce downtime and excess inventory
I
t’s all the things in your plant that get no respect — until they stop working or don’t get reordered. It’s the gear reducer at the end of the conveyor line, the drum of floor degreaser, the FRL that keeps air cylinders moving, the hose that safely holds 2,000 psi of hydraulic fluid. In short, all of the Maintenance, Repair and Operation (MRO) supplies that can stop production on the shop floor as easily as a power outage. Just like consumers are drawn to the sexy new features of a smart phone, companies pay a lot of attention to the latest whizbang technology that promises to boost production or improve quality. But they can easily overlook the importance of having MRO items available at a moment’s notice
10 ADVANCED MANUFACTURING EXPO: AUGUST 26-27, 2021 10 ADVANCED MANUFACTURING EXPO: AUGUST 26-27, 2021
or the hidden cost of holding inventories of hundreds of items — only to find that the one part that’s needed isn’t in-house.
North America and holds $750 million of inventory — more inventory than the next three competitors combined.
Dave Kennedy, manager of the Grand Rapids branch of Motion (formally known as Motion Industries Inc.), can sympathize with the difficulties that companies face when they are trying to determine what items are critical to their operations and what items they should keep on hand.
“Some of our local companies have critical pieces of equipment that, if they go down, the downtime costs can be $10,000 or more an hour — and that gets their attention quickly,” Kennedy said. “So the Grand Rapids branch itself stocks about $1.5 million of inventory of spare equipment that our customers say is critical to the operations.”
In Kennedy’s case, he’s helping to manage the MRO of hundreds of West Michigan customers spread throughout a territory bounded along the lakeshore roughly by South Haven and Fremont, then east to Ionia. A subsidiary of Genuine Parts Co. (NYSE: GPC), Motion on a corporate level has more than 500 locations throughout
The second layer of spare part protection is the MRO inventory stocked at Motion’s distribution center in Chicago, and then 15 other distribution centers in North America. Yet a third layer is Motion’s online access to the inventory
VISIT ADVANCEDMANUFACTURINGEXPO.COM
