Proactive organizations recognize that one of the critical success factors in achieving a best practices reliability program is developing a sound maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) spare parts program. That notion is quickly followed by the realization that there are potentially hundreds of improvement opportunities that typically could be associated with a materials management effort. As such, it becomes overwhelming to determine where to start.

Many companies are beginning to search for and implement sophisticated maintenance and reliability (M&R) tools and technologies in hopes of finding the next best thing to help achieve operational excellence (OE). Terms, such as asset performance management (APM), predictive analytics, machine learning, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the Cloud, connected plant, etc., are making their way into everything M&R. As game changing as these concepts can be, adopting advanced technologies without first addressing the basic fundamentals of M&R is like building the world’s finest home on a crumbling foundation.

OMC (Operations Maintenance Coordinator)…now this is a person that really reports up through the operations group…the production group. But they’re that liaison, they work hand in hand with the maintenance folks and they’re the representative for the production side to come in and see… What do we have coming up in maintenance? How do we coordinate that with our operating plan? I’ve seen this where somebody really didn’t have this title of OMC but they did that work but some places have a person that their title, that’s their job, that’s what their going to do.