Overview

You never miss the water till the well runs dry.

Rowland Howard

Stores should be run like a store clean, efficient, everything in its place, not too much or too little, run by a manager with a focus on customer (facility maintenance and operation) needs. Moreover, stores should be viewed as an asset, not a liability or cost. Maintaining a good, high-quality stores operation is in fact the low-cost approach to operating a facility. Yet, Beta International plants typically treated their stores function as if it were a necessary evil, a burdensome cost, a non-value adding function. This was not an enlightened approach. As Beta found, IF properly managed, stores will help assure a high-quality, low-cost operation. If not, stores will continue to be a "non-value adding" and expensive "necessary evil."

However, as we have seen, and will see in subsequent chapters, stores management must be viewed as part of an integrated reliability process. For example, if we could double the reliability and life of our equipment, we would need fewer spares. Maybe not half as many, but fewer. If we had good process and equipment condition monitoring in place to detect defects early, we could better manage the need for spares related to those defects. If we had excellence in maintenance planning and scheduling, which is integrated with the store room, and which is "fed" by condition monitoring, then we could much more effectively manage our spares requirements. If we do not have these, and simply reduce our spares...