Storeroom Improvement
Manufacturing
Our client a manufacturer of incandescent glass bulbs, produces nearly 1 billion bulbs annually from a 60-year-old, 250,000 sq. ft. facility. With 150 people, they run a three-shift, seven day a week operation. Their difficulty lay in the fact that the site’s storeroom and satellite storage facilities for maintenance parts and materials were completely disorganized: parts were neither identified nor labeled; there was no way to know if a part was in stock, and if it was, where it was located; and there was also no system in place to manage the inventory, its usage, nor its replenishment. As if that weren’t enough, there were 26 separate locations where parts and materials were located throughout the site. Too often, when Maintenance couldn’t find the parts and materials that were needed, they would simply purchase the items rather than spend the time searching for them, resulted in extended downtime for any equipment awaiting repair.
Approach
Our first step was to develop an overall storage plan for the site. Working with the site’s vendors and suppliers, we identified the parts and the equipment on which they were used so that part storage would be collocated with the respective equipment wherever possible.
By the end of the project, over 12,000 line items were identified and inventoried (over 95 percent of the site’s spare parts and materials), and we were able to reduce the number of storage locations from 26 to just 12. This massive sorting effort was supported by the plant maintenance personnel as well as engineering co-op students from the local university.
During the sorting process, a significant amount of obsolete material was identified and scrapped and in some instances, good parts and materials were located that the plant was unaware it had and thus avoided repurchasing.
In conjunction with the above effort, we also fully implemented their Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), a commercially available software package that they had owned for eight to 10 years. While the software was capable of managing the inventory, maintenance work orders, etc., our client had only been using it for generating and scheduling Preventive Maintenance inspections. As the above parts were identified and tagged, the information was added to the CMMS to begin building the inventory database. Review and analysis of the purchase records for the previous three years helped to determine the beginning minimum, maximum, and reorder points for the items, which was also added to the CMMS.
Results
The project accomplishments exceeded the client’s expectations, both at the plant and corporate level. Management was amazed at the amount of progress that was achieved in a relatively short amount of time. Further, the improvements provided incentive to the plant personnel to expand the effort into other areas of the site.
Before
After
