This article will define MRO inventory, dive deeper into MRO inventory management, and touch on five key components to optimal maintenance, repair, and operations inventory management.
MRO inventory stands for maintenance, repair, and operations inventory. While not “sold” to a customer, this inventory is utilized by a business to conduct preventive and corrective maintenance on an asset or keep day-to-day business activities running efficiently. MRO inventory includes the consumable supplies that enable a business to provide its goods or services.MRO Inventory Definition
Examples of MRO inventory
MRO inventory can look very different from business to business and industry to industry. After all, the items a business needs to keep its assets in tip-top shape and production running smoothly vary from sector to sector. Still, these examples of MRO inventory can help you better understand how to classify your own supplies and materials.
- Tools, supplies, and materials used for diagnosing, preventing, and repairing problems
- Machine oil and similar lubricants
- Light bulbs
- Spare parts
- Additional valves and tubes
- Safety equipment, including masks, earplugs, hard hats, and safety goggles
- Janitorial or cleaning supplies
- Office supplies and equipment
Related: What are the four types of inventory?
What is MRO inventory management?
MRO inventory management is the process of ordering, consuming, tracking, and reordering inventory essential to your business’s maintenance, repair, and operations strategy.
Unlike traditional inventory management, some businesses forget to prioritize MRO inventory management because it focuses on items that are “not for sale.” But in reality, most companies are dependent on MRO inventory to turn a profit. After all, without the right MRO inventory, a warehouse’s drone could break down, an auto body shop could run out of flashlights, or a classroom could run out of lightbulbs.
Typically, businesses adopt an MRO inventory management strategy to prevent stockouts and work stoppages. While a company can keep inventory manually using a document or a spreadsheet, inventory software often provides the best results. This is partly because modern inventory apps can notify you when you need to reorder, check on, or replace an item.
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Why is MRO inventory management so essential?
MRO inventory is key to maintaining your business’s operational health for many reasons. Here are just three of the many reasons why properly managing your MRO supplies and materials is crucial.
1. Prevent work stoppages
By always having the right amount of MRO inventory on hand, your company needn’t worry about shutting down production until an essential product is back in stock. But if you don’t know how much of a critical item you have in stock, it can be easy to run out of a crucial supply or material accidentally.
Say, for example, you work in manufacturing. You don’t sell lubricant, and it’s not part of a finished good your company will eventually sell. But the employees on your production line still rely on the lubricant to keep manufacturing equipment running smoothly. Run out, and you could face a broken machine—and a seriously costly work stoppage.
2. Avoid costly overstocks
On the flipside, stocking too much MRO inventory unnecessarily ties up a company’s cash—money that could often be better allocated to other endeavors, like marketing, hiring, or replacing old equipment. The right MRO inventory management strategy relies on tight inventory control protocols, so your business is stocking exactly what it needs, without wasting money on inventory that won’t be used in the near future.
To determine just how much MRO inventory your business needs, you’ll want to review old usage reports and inventory records. You’ll also need to balance past usage with your business’s forecasted growth to continue to place appropriately-sized orders as your company evolves.
3. Keep productivity high
Regardless of what industry you’re in, you likely prioritize productivity at your business. And while there’s nothing glamorous about MRO inventory, these are the very supplies and materials that keep your company’s light on, literally and figuratively.
Of course, you want to avoid work stoppages—that’s for sure. But poor MRO inventory management can also create frustrations that aren’t so obvious. For example, when an employee wastes time tracking down the right lightbulb or can’t perform preventative maintenance because a particular chemical is missing, these “slowdowns” slowly chip away at your company’s productivity and profitability.
Key components of MRO inventory management
These MRO inventory management best practices can help keep your business organized, profitable, and productive—all by ensuring that you have the inventory your business needs to keep things running smoothly.
1. Creating detailed, organized, and specific inventory lists
You’ll need to organize your MRO inventory based on your available space. While there’s no right way to organize a stockroom, storage closet, or even a warehouse, you should pick an organizational system that makes sense to you and your team, then stick with it.
When organizing your MRO inventory, you must record all the essential details of your supplies and materials.
When creating or updating your inventory list, ensure that you note all the attributes of each item you stock, from glass cleaner to generator. Why be so specific? Specificity helps employees select the right item to perform a certain action. Using the right screwdriver, the right valve, the right chemical—it matters. Being hyper-specific also helps technicians identify suitable substitutes when an ideal part is unavailable.
It’s also critical that your team correctly record the location of each item. After all, what good is a robust inventory if your team can’t find anything on it?
You can also add high-resolution photos and attachments like manuals to your inventory list, if you’re using inventory software, which can improve specificity while speeding up inventory counts and audits.
2. Appropriate reordering
As you already know, ordering the “perfect” amount of MRO inventory allows your company to operate optimally without tying up cash on products not currently needed. This, once again, is known as inventory control. When you reorder MRO supplies and materials, you’ll be weighing what your business needs with what it can afford—and how much storage space it has available.
You can also tighten up your reordering process by focusing on your relationship with suppliers, rethinking your supply chain, and calculating key metrics like lead time and safety stock.
Whether you place orders yourself or work with a procurement team, appropriate reordering is key to proper MRO inventory management.
3. Keeping an eye on important dates
Tracking key dates for maintenance, repair, warranty end, and expiration. You can track these dates on a paper calendar, by creating events in a shared virtual calendar, or by creating alerts in an inventory app.
4. Tracking items as they are used, consumed, sold, moved
For genuinely accurate MRO inventory management, your business should track supplies and materials whenever they are received, moved, or consumed. This is also known as perpetual inventory—and it’s much easier to sustain with the help of inventory management software.
While you could technically keep track of every item’s every move manually, barcode and QR code scanning offers more accurate tracking in a fraction of the time.
5. Selecting the right software
Updating an inventory spreadsheet quickly becomes tedious, messy, and inefficient. To most effectively manage your MRO inventory, you should select inventory software that streamlines inventory tasks. Sortly inventory software can help you:
- Update your inventory from any device, any location
- Track inventory as it moves across multiple locations
- Scan barcodes and QR codes to check items in and out, quickly update levels, or learn more about an item in an instant
- Create robust, customized inventory details full of the information that matters most to you
- Link photos and attachments to your items
- Generate customized reports full of powerful insights into your business
- Set alerts so you’ll know whenever an item is running low, approaching expiration, or warranty end
- Give customized access to your team
About Sortly
Sortly is an end-to-end inventory solution that lets you organize, track, and manage your inventory from any device, in any location. Our easy-to-use mobile app lets you and your team update inventory on the job so you can spend less time on inventory tasks and more time building your business. Sortly streamlines your inventory operations instantly, which helps your business stay efficient, plan better, and serve your customers to their highest satisfaction.
If your company would benefit from improved inventory management, try Sortly free for 14 days.
