Inventory / Spares and Purchasing System

Spare parts and other items (eg. grease) are required for normal planned or preventive maintenance activities.

An inventory control system therefore helps asset managers to plan work.

By interfacing inventory control systems with the other key systems, jobs and activities can be more efficiently planned, executed and controlled.

Example

When a work order is raised for either planned or unplanned work in the maintenance management system, staff can check that the spare parts, repair materials are available, their quantity and location, and book these for the job. Costs for the items should be automatically recorded against the job and therefore provide accurate asset costs.

The system can help trace a critical item quickly by recording the sources of materials, even if they aren't held in stock.

The system can also assist with risk management by allowing specialist repair materials to be recorded against the asset as part of a "failure management plan". This helps reduce the impact of failures with low probability but high consequences.

Functionality

Key functionality includes:

• An inventory of all spare parts and materials normally available in store and through suppliers
• A connection between these items and the assets listed in the hierarchical asset register in the maintenance management system.

The system should be capable of:

• Recording enough details of the spares and inventory items to fully identify them
• Recording current stock levels
• Automatically calculating re-order level and re-order quantity, based on recorded usage rate, complete with manual override
• Allowing the updating of current stock levels manually (stocktake) and recording discrepancies in the form of an audit report
• Ordering specialist items (one off)
• Monitoring back-ordered inventories
• Issuing inventory against work orders or directly to employees
• Accepting returned (unused) stock
• Identifying the location of the stock in a variety of store locations including mobile facilities
• Monitoring inventory usage and costs
• Recording unit costs
• Completing report summaries on suppliers/items etc.
• Maintaining a database on or interface with a list of material manufacturers, spare parts suppliers/agents.

The system should interface with the maintenance management system.