January is the time when we traditionally set goals for the rest of the calendar year. At a personal level these might be New Year’s Resolutions to give up smoking, lose weight, or get fit. Recently I read an article that claimed that by January 31st 90% of New Year’s Resolutions have been given up.
In inventory management our goal setting might be more formal than a New Year’s Resolution but I wonder what the ‘give up’ rate for inventory management goals usually is. Actually, ‘give up’ is really the wrong term, after all, whoever says ‘we decided to give up on inventory reduction because it is too hard’? We are not talking here about the annual diet or giving up smoking! In management our ‘give up’ mechanism is more subtle than that. Usually projects fade away and are forgotten rather than overtly given up.
One of the main reasons that this occurs is a lack of transparency in tracking actions and results. Perhaps this year your goal should be to put the spare into tranSPAREncy (get it?). More correctly, put some transparency into your spares management program.
During the interviews for the 2009 Materials and Spares Management Survey (completed in just the past few weeks) I was surprised at the number of respondents that had little or no reporting of their spares inventory levels. With no transparency it is little wonder that often these organizations also suffered from high stock outs, low stock turns, and a general lack of faith in their spares management.
When implementing an inventory improvement program, transparency is arguably the number one attribute that separates the achievers from those whose programs just fade away. Inventory management improvement or reduction programs need transparency of who is to do what and by when. Plus transparency in the follow up of those that miss targets or deadlines. Without this, program team members can forget the importance of the program when managing the urgency of day-to-day activities. In my experience, this is when programs then just fade away.
This year, resolve to put more transparency into your inventory reduction or improvement programs.
