Another major prerequisite to properly establishing storeroom and purchasing departments is to define the storage area and the types of storage equipment required. One of the first issues that must be addressed is the footprint of the storeroom area. The area of the storeroom must be a balance between having enough storage for all the spare parts and the cost of the storage area itself. Most companies do not provide sufficient space to store spare parts.

This has led to the development of an industry to provide storage devices to optimize the space that is available. For example, Figure 1-9 shows a shelf and box arrangement. This particular example uses card-board boxes correctly labeled on the end for the spare parts that are contained in the box. In addition to the cardboard boxes, there are also plastic and for some specialized spare parts metal boxes. This shelving and box arrangement allows the spare parts to be stored, assigned a shelfbin location, and quickly retrieved when required. This arrangement is quite common in most MRO storerooms.

Figure 1-9: Shelving and Box Arrangement

Another storage arrangement that is quite useful is pictured in Figure 1-10. This is known as a stacked drawer arrangement. Each of the drawers has small partitions where individual spare parts can be stored. Each of the small partitions is labeled with the appropriate part number. This arrangement is very useful because each part can be given an aisle, bin, drawer, and...