9 MRO Storeroom Best Practices

A maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) storeroom houses critical parts and tools used in the operation and maintenance of critical equipment. An efficient MRO storeroom is clean and optimally organized, which helps companies reduce waste, lower costs, and shorten maintenance cycles and repair times.  

Today we will discuss a variety of MRO storeroom best practices to increase efficiency, optimize the total cost of your storeroom, and keep your assets and equipment up and running.

9 MRO Storeroom Best Practices For Optimization

The following MRO storeroom best practices are designed to help you streamline your processes and improve the cost-efficiency of your MRO inventory management.

1. Define Your Goals and KPIs

The best way to ensure that you’re following best practices and improving your MRO management is by defining clear goals with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). Some of the key metrics that help measure the success of an MRO program include:

• Stock level and turnover rate
• Percentage of parts assigned to work orders
• Average wait time for parts
• Inventory accuracy and stockout rate
• Part costs and emergency purchase rate
• Vendor efficiency

2. Plan the Layout

The layout of the MRO storeroom should be optimized to reduce item pick times and improve efficiency. Ensure your team can easily access the parts needed for your most critical equipment by keeping them near the front of the room and at eye level. In addition, prioritize high-use items and keep the low-use ones in the back.  

3. Stay Clean and Organized

A messy storeroom is harder to navigate, which means your team might not be able to find the parts they need to repair critical equipment. Not only does this create unnecessary delays, but companies also end up wasting money by purchasing duplicate parts for items that were simply misplaced. MRO managers must ensure that the storeroom is routinely cleaned and that parts and tooling are put back in the proper location when checked in. 

4. Utilize Best Practices When Storing Items

To extend the lifetime of your parts and ensure that things will be in optimal working order when you need them, you should store items according to best practices. For example, rubber belts and tubes should be stored coiled up and away from direct fluorescent lighting to prevent deterioration. In addition, the vibrations from the production floor can damage large bearings, so these items should be stored on a vibration pad.

5. Maintain Optimal Environmental Conditions

Another way to extend the lifetime of critical parts is to prevent damage from extreme temperatures or humidity. Specific assets may have defined thresholds for air temperature and humidity, but in general, it is best to keep the room cool and relatively dry.

6. Implement Smart Cycle Counting

Yearly inventory counts are time-consuming and disruptive. Plus, any asset management problems that are uncovered in the count are likely to have occurred too long in the past to adequately investigate or mitigate. Instead, MRO storeroom best practices involve monthly or short-period cycle counting for critical spares or long lead time, high-value items. Essentially, employ a technique in which you count a few items in various areas of the room each month instead of doing it all at once. For important items, counting a specific selection of parts provides information about on-hand and physical quantities in a timely manner. For parts and spares less critical, employ physical counts and longer period cycles. Or perform opportunistic or ad-hoc physical counts if more appropriate for your operation.

7. Assign All Parts 

Every part checked out of the MRO storeroom needs to be assigned to a specific asset, department, or work order to ensure nothing is unaccounted for. This will help prevent stockouts (parts being marked in stock in inventory but not being available in the storeroom) and ensure teams always have the tools and supplies they need when critical assets require repairs.

8. Secure the MRO Storeroom

The MRO storeroom needs to be secured to ensure that nobody walks off with a part without following the correct checkout processes. The best practice is to use keycard locks to ensure only authorized personnel have access.

9. Invest in a CMMS Solution

A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) is a software solution used to optimize maintenance operations. It provides valuable inventory management capabilities to help MRO managers stay organized and improve the efficiency of their ordering and replenishment. For example, LLumin’s CMMS+ solution is a cloud-based platform that provides centralized control over MRO inventory management so companies can optimize their processes, reduce the overall cost of their storeroom, and ensure critical parts are always on hand when an emergency strikes.

Follow MRO Storeroom Best Practices with LLumin’s CMMS+

LLumin’s CMMS+ simplifies MRO storeroom best practices by giving teams a convenient cloud portal from which to manage and optimize inventory management processes. LLumin provides visibility into infrastructure and asset health, alerting maintenance technicians to immediate maintenance needs and helping them predict future problems. LLumin also uses automation to streamline work orders and delivery notifications, improving efficiency and reducing employee workload. That also means MRO staff are likelier to follow MRO storeroom best practices by keeping the storeroom clean and organized.

When choosing to work with LLumin, your implementation will be configured to match your unique company goals and business processes. Further, our software is easy to deploy, and a dedicated project manager will help you throughout the entire implementation process.

So if you are looking for a cutting-edge CMMS+ accompanied by a seamless implementation process and an expert customer support staff, then LLumin is a perfect fit.

Getting Started With LLumin

LLumin develops innovative CMMS software to manage and track assets, while optimizing materials management,  for industrial plants, municipalities, utilities, fleets, and facilities. To start implementing MRO storeroom best practices, we encourage you to schedule a free demo or contact the experts at LLumin to see how our CMMS+ software can help you reach your efficiency and cost-cutting goals.