Using Reservations at Your Plant to Obtain Materials and Minimize Delays

By Doug Wallace, CPIM, Senior Consultant - Materials Management SME, Life Cycle Engineering

I am a senior consultant and materials management subject matter expert at Life Cycle Engineering. To be honest, I don’t much care for that title. What I really am is a parts guy — a box-kicker, as my co-worker calls it. My wife prefers to call me an inventory manager. As my mother used to say, “I don’t care what you call me. Just don’t call me late for dinner.” I don’t know why she said that, but she did, and now I say it, too, even though I don’t really get the reference. The point is I truly don’t care what people call me. What’s important is they trust my knowledge and experience to help them to solve their MRO material challenges.

For the past 10 years I have been helping people use materials management best practices to reduce their inventory, improve productivity, and provide better service to their customers in operations and maintenance. One of the first things I stress is the use of kitting for planned jobs and reservations for unplanned materials due to emergencies, discovery, or opportunistic work. There is so much time wasted at the warehouse wicket while mechanics, sometimes several at once, shoot the breeze for a while before trying to explain what they really want and then wait while the warehouse clerks try to satisfy their often unrealistic expectations.

Read the complete article, published on www.PlantServies.com.

 

Doug Wallace, CPIM, is senior consultant — materials management subject matter expert at Life Cycle Engineering. He’s also knowledgeable in planning and scheduling and operator care best practices and is certified in Prosci change management methodology. He can be reached at dwallace@LCE.com

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