Find and Order Spare Parts Faster
Asset-intensive organizations rely heavily on effective Spare Parts Management to reduce costs while keeping operations running smoothly. During repairs or routine maintenance, asset-intensive organizations are faced with two predominant problems:
1. How do I figure out what parts are needed?
2. Once I know what parts I need, how do I order them?
Unfortunately, in most businesses, it’s completely separate parts of the organization dealing with each of these problems. And even worse, their processes, systems, information, and personnel are completely siloed from one another and, therefore, work together in a highly inefficient way.
How We Help
We NRX AssetHub is a complete solution for improving Spare Parts Management. It operates in both the EAM/work order world to help find and select the correct part fast and the procurement world to help make it easier to order the correct spare part.
Build Illustrated Parts Catalogues Associated with Equipment in the EAM
Our customers use NRX AssetHub to build illustrated parts catalogues associated with equipment in the EAM. After doing so, parts are connected to the identification number in the procurement system. From an EAM work order, you can visually select a part in an exploded parts diagram, follow a hotpoint link to the part in a parts list, and quickly select the part(s) to be added. Supplementary content such as pictures and vendor manuals can also be included to simplify the selection process. You can then specify quantities, and update the work order automatically. The benefits of this solution are that planners and workers can select replacement parts quickly and accurately. This reduces costs associated with misordered parts and increases wrench time. Also, this option eliminates the need to improve the quality of parts data in your procurement system. The drawback of this approach is that it requires you to invest significant time and effort upfront to create illustrated parts catalogues and link them to parts in the procurement system. It may only make sense for frequently serviced or safety critical equipment.
Build BOMs from Vendor-Recommended Spare Parts Lists
Using NRX AssetHub, you can easily view the list of vendor-recommended spare parts for an asset in the visual parts catalog. Maintenance staff can use the vendor parts list to quickly create a BOM. Use intelligent SKU matching to match the recommended parts to parts in inventory, and add the SKUs to a BOM. You can also see lists of suggested BOMs based on similarities in assets, and quickly associate one or more with an asset. Consequently, you can build accurate BOMs quickly that are connected to the procurement system and easily accessed from work orders. Intelligent SKU matching eliminates duplicate and obsolete spare parts as well. The drawback is that building accurate BOMs for every piece of equipment is a time-consuming task. It may only be necessary to create BOMs for critical equipment or equipment that require frequent parts orders.
Organize Vendor Documents and Link them Directly to Locations and Equipment in an EAM
NRX AssetHub can automatically create search indexes based on equipment attributes, and organize the documents in a logical, consistent manner. It then ensures that search indexes of vendor documents remain in sync with their assets, and updates the indexes automatically as assets or asset attributes change. You can then easily link documents from your Document Management System with the assets to which they apply in the EAM system to be easily located from a work order. The benefits to this are that maintenance workers find vendor information quickly and reduce downtime. The drawback is that you must ensure all vendor documents are up-to-date and accurate prior to loading them into your Document Management system. For large asset-intensive companies, this can be a tedious and time-consuming task.
Create Accurate Equipment Data
NRX AssetHub allows you to quickly and easily build rock-solid asset and maintenance data. The building process is collaborative, iterative, and highly transparent. Just acquire and load data from multiple sources into NRX AssetHub, edit and validate the data collaboratively with maintenance personnel and/or contractors, and deploy high-quality EAM-ready data when finished. By doing so, you can be sure that data deployed is complete and accurate, thereby avoiding costly data cleansing projects in the future and reducing the cost of on-going maintenance and operations.
Automate the Parts Request Process to Enforce Data Governance and Easily Capture Information Needed by the Procurement System
NRX AssetHub provides a flexible, customizable form and email-based governance and workflow around requests to add, delete, change or replace parts and BOMs either one at a time or in bulk. It also includes a powerful parts search feature that searches all relevant fields in the existing EAM parts list at once to find all close matches rather than strictly exact matches. This avoids duplicate parts from the beginning without having to waste time with multiple searches.
Standardize Parts Descriptions
NRX AssetHub lets you automatically name a part based on its class and attributes as you create it, or run a job to rename existing parts in bulk. The format of the description changes based on the type of material and the naming convention can be customized to standardize the names of existing materials. The benefit of this is that it is easy to keep materials names consistent and to enforce corporate naming standards. Also, defining attributes will now be displayed in the description so that finding and selecting the correct parts is simple.
Take Advantage of a Standard Library of Material Classes and Characteristics to Organize, Locate, and Analyze Parts in the Procurement System
NRX AssetHub provides an out-of-the-box class and characteristic library for parts with support for customization and the ability to load third party libraries. Procedures for classifying, adding and renaming parts are completely automated and intelligent suggestions speed the process of associating classes with equipment by recommending matches for equipment with similar properties. Copy and paste functionality, and bulk operations help users to apply changes to groups of objects quickly and easily. You can then search and filter catalogues of EAM parts by EAM descriptions and attributes including material class and characteristics.
Locate Unnecessary Inventory, Eliminate Duplicate Parts, and Resolve Data Quality Issues
NRX AssetHub helps our customers identify data quality issues using powerful reporting capabilities and by providing a complete 360 degree view of your asset hierarchy to highlight gaps, and measure the completeness of parts data in your EAM. Intelligent filtering allows customers to focus on areas of particular concern, such as misnamed or unclassified parts, and to locate unnecessary inventory and duplicate parts. Once issues have been discovered, corrective actions can be made to eliminate inadequacies and eliminate costs associated with duplicate or unnecessary inventory. Simplify the procurement process with more accurate and complete asset information. The drawback is that fixing spare part data is an expensive process. Rather than fixing everything at once, analyze where the most lost revenue and expenses are occurring in your business and address those problems first for greatest ROI.