Why is my kitting process not working?
By Wally Wilson, CMRP, CPIM, Life Cycle Engineering
As appeared in Plant Services Magazine
Everybody believes that implementing a kitting process to support their planned and scheduled equipment repairs is a really good idea. A well-implemented kitting process will pay huge benefits in the form of reduced inventory investment, increased utilization of maintenance technicians and storeroom employees as well as overall equipment reliability. But problems arise when we assume everyone understands the kitting process and when lines of communication between the storeroom, the maintenance planners, and the maintenance and operations teams are not well-defined.
One consistent barrier to kitting parts and tools for planned work is break-in work to the scheduled maintenance work for the day. Most of the time these schedule breakers are jobs that the operations or maintenance supervisor believe are critical and have to be done immediately. In fact, most of these jobs are not critical and most can be planned and scheduled for a later time. When these schedule breaks occur the kits that are delivered and ready for the maintenance technician to execute the job are pushed off and they have to be re-scheduled at a later date. Having kits linger in the kit staging area or in the maintenance shop makes them a target to be robbed of parts. As more scheduled jobs are pushed off, what’s communicated to employees is that planned and scheduled work isn’t a high priority; this reinforces a reactive environment for maintenance work.
Read the complete article, published on www.PlantServices.com
Wally Wilson CMRP, CPIM, is a Senior Subject Matter Expert in Materials Management with Life Cycle Engineering. Wally has more than 30 years of experience in plant management with three Fortune-500 corporations and has helped both domestic and international clients realize multi-million-dollar savings through lean inventory-management practices and supply-chain optimization. You can contact him at wwilson@LCE.com.
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