Maintaining inventory levels is often a balancing act, but the right maintenance inventory software handles your biggest challenges efficiently and effectively. You can avoid overstock and tied-up capital as well as minimize financial loss from equipment downtime and delayed shipments. A foolproof management system is available.
Key Takeaways:
- Operational success depends on your ability to track, control and optimize your inventory, including the tools, materials, and stock parts necessary to fix equipment.
- Inventory management systems rely on integrations between standard operating procedures and cloud-based software to centrally and digitally monitor business assets such as parts, raw materials, and deliverables.
- Reducing operational inefficiencies in your maintenance inventory increases your profitability. Technicians have the necessary parts to keep critical equipment operating smoothly.
You can change your bottom line and the customer experience with inventory management software. To create a bigger advantage in these areas, let Watkyn customize maintenance software for your unique needs.
How Maintenance Inventory Software Benefits Your Business
Maintenance inventory, often called spare parts inventory, consists of the materials and replacement parts available for your critical machinery. Maintenance inventory software tracks information related to work order assignments and quantities and locations of parts so you can accurately keep up with your maintenance inventory.
By implementing a custom application for maintenance inventory management, you can achieve optimal operations, guarantee your technicians have the resources to perform needed maintenance, and ensure your consumers get their products without delays.
Reduce Human Error Inaccuracies
Tracking stock levels manually often leads to errors and inaccurate records, with inventory inaccuracies costing the national economy over $1 trillion a year. Manual tracking is also time-consuming, siphoning employee labor hours away from more productive tasks. With automated software management, you can reduce data duplications, miscounts, and labeling errors.
Reduce Storage Costs
An accurate view of your parts inventory gives you better insight into ordering replacement materials. This keeps you from overbuying and trapping your money in stock. Effectively managing inventory levels saves money on warehousing and storage costs.
Reduce Location Confusion
Maintenance inventory software helps prevent confusion and delays with multiple-location storage. You can track spare parts across different locations. You can also relocate pieces rather than place a single order for a facility. Ordering in bulk and distributing parts between locations can also save on ordering and shipping costs.
Reduce Losses
With accurate insights, you can keep from over-investing in rarely used parts and materials. Analytics can also track and help calculate ordering quantities based on certain triggers. You can avoid running out by automating order recommendations based on these triggers.
Reduce Customer Dissatisfaction
Maintenance management can prevent lengthy, unplanned downtime and production interruption in manufacturing industries. Production failure means failure to meet customer demand. With maintenance inventory management software, you always have the parts ready to quickly restore machinery.
How Maintenance Inventory Software Works
Custom-built inventory platforms often rely on a computerized maintenance management system or ERP software that has operator interfaces, administrative settings, reporting dashboards, and information databases. When you work with a custom solutions provider, your application meets the needs of your maintenance inventory and business operations.
Regardless of the system you use to build your maintenance inventory platform, the functionality should allow you to manage several critical areas of inventory management.
1. Identify Parts
The first task is to identify every part needed across all facilities for every maintenance activity. Include one-time use and frequent replacements in the database. These set the baseline for your future inventory. It will also build your first inventory counts.
Creating equipment barcodes or QR codes for each part helps automate every activity related to part management. Mobile apps and hand-held scanners allow real-time access for ordering, stocking, replacing, and tracking parts across activities. Your system is highly efficient when it can both generate and read barcodes to maintain inventory.
2. Assign Parts Information
There is a lot of information to attach to a specific part, including the location. Stock inventory should match its location. Create a database of parts information that is precise and comprehensive. Whether scanning parts or reviewing a report, your maintenance inventory software needs to present a bird’s eye view of important information.
3. Create Accurate Bill of Materials (BOM)
The BOM is the detailed list of all parts and quantities tied to a special asset or component. This list makes it easy to assign parts to a work order and order replacements, though BOMs need regular updates to be accurate and error-free.
4. Streamline Work Order Processing
Technicians need a way to document the parts they use for work order assignments. This keeps an accurate inventory of count and availability for future tasks. The system should automatically update inventory levels with assignments and connections to work orders when scanning a part’s barcode or QR code.
How To Use Maintenance Inventory Software to Your Advantage
You can easily increase efficiency, save money, and take control of your inventory with a user-friendly, customized management platform. To create advantages for your company, your solutions should do the following:
- Generate cost tracking reports: Inform decision-making regarding capital by tracking asset downtime, used parts costs, mean-time-to-repair, etc.
- Low-inventory alerts: Get custom notifications for low inventory based on critical parts, unique machinery, or departmental needs.
- Barcode scanning: Use barcodes and scanning to assign parts to work orders, update inventory, or check locations.
- Digital audit trails: Rely on the cloud for real-time access through smartphone apps or other devices to manage inventory and increase team accountability.
- Purchase orders: Develop a system capable of generating purchase orders when needed and automatically updating inventory quantities with order fulfillment.
- Custom integrations: Connect to your other important tools and systems and use add-ons and integrations to increase the capabilities and efficiencies of your management software.
Working with an inventory management system can help optimize your maintenance practices, particularly when you customize the platform to your company’s processes and needs.
How To Find a Partner To Develop Your Maintenance Inventory Software
When you are looking for customization with maintenance inventory software, Watkyn is the team to trust. We have years of industry experience with custom solutions, giving you the bottom-line benefits of increased performance and productivity. Contact us to find out more.
