MRO Today - Fearsome foursome tackled massive job

Fearsome foursome tackled massive job

by Paul V. Arnold

With more than 60 years of combined experience at Borg-Warner
Automotive's plant in Frankfort, Ill., Karl Berns, Otto Heft, Jeff Lonergan and Ted Mecinas thought they had seen it all and done it all.

Mysterious mechanical meltdowns. Electrical engineering enigmas. Touchy tooling topics. Tough nuts, all cracked by four of the maintenance department's best.

But when these men were handed the task of solving some of the
facility's MRO inventory problems in the summer of 1997, each silently wondered if he had met his match.

"This was a gigantic, massive project," says Lonergan, a toolmaker at the site since 1976.

The fearsome foursome, MRO Today magazine's MRO Pros for December/January, received a 7-inch-thick folder of printouts listing all the stock keeping units and item stocking levels for the maintenance storerooms.

The group's job?
1) Examine every item listed on every page. "There were tens of thousands of items," says Lonergan.
2) Determine if the minimum/maximum level for each item was appropriate or in need of updating.
3) Target obsolete items.

Technical services manager Maynard Loy says the job wasn't punishment. It was critical to the health of the plant.

"We had things we hadn't used in 10 years, but we were having stockouts of items that we used all the time," says Loy, who oversees Frankfort's electricians, mechanics and toolmakers. All these guys know what is in that crib. They are intimately familiar with our inventory because they work with these items every day."

The group had three months to complete the project.

"You start by looking for the big bucks, the high-priced items," says Mecinas, a maintenance electrician at the plant since 1988. "We went into the computer and examined usage -- how much was used, where it was used, if it was used."

Heft, a plant mechanic since 1983, says 10 percent of the inventory on the books was obsolete.

"If it was for equipment we no longer had, we found a way to get rid of it," he says. "There's no sense having that on the shelf."

In many cases, the group pinpointed potentially dangerous min/max levels. For a changeover job that might require six of a particular item, the maximum listed for that item might be four.

"If the person assigning stocking levels isn't familiar with our needs, you can have problems. That's why it's critical to have our input," says Berns, a plant toolmaker since 1982. "They might keep less because it's less expensive. But people working on the floor, we might need a different amount in order to do our job."

The project eliminated hundreds of line items, changed stocking levels on thousands of items and created correct stock levels for all of the plant's MRO materials.

This article appeared in the December 1999/January 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2000.