Nobody can deny that UK industry is amongst the most efficient in the world. A tight focus on cost-down measures has produced lean, competitive industries capable of competing, and winning, in globalised markets.

However, even in the biggest and best industries, just away from the factory floor there is often a room, or series of rooms, which is cluttered, badly managed (or not managed at all) and overloaded with stock.

The storeroom is all-too-often a black hole which sucks in stock, with engineers, who should be on the factory floor fixing machinery, reduced to leafing through catalogues to find what they need to repair vital equipment.

In the middle of it all, sits the ‘Storeroom Manager’, desperately fighting a losing battle, whilst expected to manage suppliers and inventory, provide technical support, perform stock takes, and serve behind a counter. 

Man in the middle

However, this ‘Storeroom Manager’ can often take the form of a number of individuals, many of whom have multiple responsibilities above and beyond the storeroom, and herein lies a key issue affecting the smooth-running of the UK’s industrial stores – mixed, or minimal responsibility. 

ERIKS’ report on the state of the nation’s stores, ‘Factory stores: manufacturing’s necessary evil’* found that less than a quarter (24%) of stores were managed by maintenance departments, whilst 30% declared that responsibility was split between production, maintenance and facilities management and a further 12% stated that no-one took charge of the storeroom. As such, nearly half (42%) of those surveyed identified that the responsibility of their storeroom was not attributable to one department, let alone one individual ‘Storeroom Manager’.

Taking stock

Given half (50.4%) of those surveyed had stock worth in excess of £250,000, only 16% said they conducted a monthly stock-take. Raising even more cause for concern, over a third (38.5%) either did not know when their last stock take took place, or admitted to never taking one. Not knowing what’s in your storeroom is one of the biggest drains on maintenance budgets, leading to items becoming obsolete or duplicated.

More than a third (36%) of respondents admitted it took over 30 minutes to find a part within their stores. Given the added time it would take to potentially stop a process, remove and replace a faulty part, and then re-start the application, this extra downtime per part sourced is a significant drain on resource and detrimental to the overall productivity of the site.

Final thoughts 

Factory stores are a necessary evil integral to supporting a site’s engineers. Despite this, storerooms and inventory are all-too-often overlooked and not given the right tools to do the job properly, in terms of IT equipment or external MRO supplier support, leading to inevitable out of control spending on spares and wasted time.

UK manufacturers have to recognise that spares and parts sourcing is a complex job, requiring specialist skills and resources. If those skills are not available in-house, then industry should consider outsourcing. 

The answer lies in better linkage between engineering and stores. Factory stores should be dynamic, constantly assessing the needs and requirements of their engineering ‘partners’ and working to an agreed strategy. Only in this way can factory stores stop being a drain on resources, and truly support the wider business.

*‘Factory stores: manufacturing’s necessary evil – Balancing productivity, inventory and management responsibility in UK factory storerooms’ can be downloaded from http://knowhow.eriks.co.uk/eriks_iet_research_download.