How to Manage Your Spare Parts Inventory with a CMMS

Transcript

Hi. Welcome to today's webinar, how to manage your spare parts inventory with the CMMS.

My name is Stacy, and I'm on the marketing team with Limble. I'm so happy you decided to join us today.

Before I introduce our speaker, I'd like to cover some basic housekeeping items. All phone lines have been muted to maintain the sound quality of today's event, but I encourage you to ask questions via the questions box on your webinar screen, and we will get to them as we can at the end. We are also recording this session, and we'll send out the recording tomorrow.

If you joined us, a couple weeks ago for our last webinar on five actionable strategies for overcoming maintenance challenges, you may remember that we ran out of time to cover one of the issues that our panel was gonna talk about, which was around supply chain.

We will likely schedule another webinar to dive into that in more detail. But in the meantime, we had planned to have this demo webinar as a follow-up to show how Limble can help maintenance teams with their spare parts inventory.

Before I introduce our speaker, we do have a couple polls.

I'd like to see if you have one central parts room or if you're spread out among multiple part locations.

I'll give everybody just a moment to respond.

Looks like we have a couple so far. We'll give everybody just a a little bit longer.

Okay. So so far, looks like about sixty four percent have multiple locations where they are storing their spare parts.

The second poll that we have are do you have a dedicated parts or procurement manager?

Give everybody just a couple of no more minutes.

We're about fifty percent.

So if you haven't had a a moment, please respond.

Okay. So it looks like about seventy two seventy two percent of you have, a dedicated person in this role. So that's super exciting. Thank you everybody for participating.

So now without further ado, I'm so excited to introduce our speaker. Ken Kyle is a sales engineer dedicated to guiding maintenance professionals and understanding and choosing the most fitting technical solutions for their maintenance needs. With over thirteen years of experience, he's played a pivotal role in implementing and training companies on various software platforms. In his free time amid the delightful chaos of wrangling his four kids, Ken explores the world of emerging technologies and as a coder. Welcome, Ken. And now I'll pass it over to you.

Perfect. Thank you, Stacy.

Appreciate everybody being here today, and I'm excited to go through this with you. It's not gonna be super long today. I think we have about thirty minutes set aside. So we'll do about, twenty minutes showing you, how Limble you can, manage your your spare parts in your inventory inside of Limble and some best practices and things like that as well.

And, we'll save some time at the end. I think Stacy mentioned this, but we'll save some time at the end for some q and a as well. So if you have questions, throw them into the chat there or, yeah, we'll I think we'll just collect them there, and we'll answer those at the end. So there we go.

You should be able to see this now. Now we're in into Limble.

So now what you can see here is I'm actually on my global dashboard, and that was gonna be the last thing after adding a part to a to a work order and showing you how that gets pulled out of inventory is coming in looking at some of these reports here. We'll spend just a brief time on that and then we'll get to the questions here.

So first things first, the parts screen. So the way that I have Limble set up, I've got three different locations here. You may just be one centralized location with multiple parts, you know, parts closet, parts rooms, whatever it is, you may be spread out across the country as well.

You also may be just one location, one parts room. So in this case, I've got three different physical locations maybe spread out across the country or maybe different cities here. I'm gonna use this one, Vandelay Industries.

Hopefully, some of you, will catch where that company is from.

And, from here, if you're familiar with Limble, this is where I can see my manage work, go to my tasks, I can manage my assets, but we'll focus here on our part screen.

So once I jump in here, this is where I'll be able to see all the parts that I that I have in the system. So you can see I've already uploaded some. It's pretty easy to go in and add and add a part. Not actually gonna go through that today because we're actually gonna dive in and look at a part.

You can also have customized fields on these parts as well, and I'll get to that in a minute. But I just wanna point out for those of you who are already loo using Limble, a lot of times when we're doing implementations or I'm talking with our, with our users in the field, they don't realize that you can actually customize this window here. So I do wanna point that out that if you click on this button, I can choose what fields of my parts I actually wanna display on here. And this is also customized to the user who's logging in. So maybe you as just a a manager or a line manager wants to see one view and your parts manager wants to see a different view. Each of you can customize that view, yourself.

Okay? So obviously I've got a lot of parts here as well. I can also see my current quantities. I can also see parts that are reserved. So when you see that icon here, it just means that there is an active work order that has not yet been closed that has a part associated with it. So whether it's a a preventative maintenance or a reactive work order, if if I, as a technician, have added a part on there, it'll show me in my in my inventory that I've got, something reserved. And then I can even click on that and see exactly what task is associated with that there.

K? Before we jump into one of these parts and dive in deeper, I also wanna point out the search functionality. So I can look come in here and I can maybe look for a filter, and it's gonna show up and see everything with that name on that as well. So that's one area to do that.

And also from our main screen, you can just do a global search here where I can specifically say, hey. I wanna see this part, where you can look up that exact part. Or if I even look in the task, it'll tell me which task that part has been used or any assets that are associated with those parts. So lots of ways that we can actually use the search functionality to find what we're looking for, whether we're looking for something in stock or we're looking for a historical usage of that.

So there's other ways. There's reporting where we can see histories, but this is also just a quick way, to find what we're looking for and just typing in, you know, organically what you have there.

So let's jump into these parts, and doesn't look like there's questions yet, though. So I'm going to jump in and continue here. And, again, if you do have questions, throw them in the chat, and Stacy will let me know.

K. Let's go to this air filter here.

I've got this a little bit built out. I've used it a couple times on some of my work orders, and this is your main screen. This is your centralized location of everything that I need to know about this part. And the nice thing that you'll see here, in addition to these basic things like, hey, what's it called?

What's our part numbers? How many do we have? If there's anything that you want to keep in here that is unique to you, we can add a field or you can add a field and create these custom fields and either reuse them on multiple parts or just for specific ones. So whether or not you wanna do additional pictures, upload user manuals, sometimes that is a big deal depending on the part you wanna have that kind of information uploaded in there, we can certainly do that.

If there's any dates related to that and you wanna get notifications about certain things and reminders of dates coming up about these parts, you can set those on there as well. So any fields that you want, as many fields as you want, we can load that on the screen here, with you for you.

I'll come back to the quantity in a second here, but I also before we before we start talking about the usage of these parts and how to get them out of inventory and things, I wanna briefly mention these top tabs over here as well. So vendor list, you can actually see our vendors right here, but we can list out our vendors and and designate which one is our primary as well as secondary and and additional ones as well. So we can keep track of their part numbers. So as you notice here, I can keep track of my own internal part number, but then I can also have, the part numbers from the vendors themselves, track what their most recent prices are. And that way, when we go to use them or if we need to order them, we know automatically who we're gonna order from and if they're out of stock, who I can who an alternate, vendor is to go to for that.

Same thing with this assets tabs is just a list of everything where we've used this in the past. So I can manually associate these assets, which is a good thing if you wanna do that, if you know what they are. But the nice thing is if if you're new to Limble and you have a lot of parts, this may take you a lot of time, resources that you don't necessarily have to be able to go in and manually choose, okay, on this part, which asset does it go to? And then you can go through and and find all the all the parts that I've got here and and figure out and manually associate them.

However, Limble will automatically do that for you as well. Just, is it how that happens is as I'm closing out my work orders, if I'm adding parts, it's automatically gonna recognize that this work order with this asset had this certain part used. It's gonna automatically associate those with those. So, again, you can do it automatically or manually associate that.

And then finally, we'll come back to this, after I go through the work order process, but a log and the reporting, will close-up with those. So I'll come back to those tabs here.

Okay, so back to this info tab, you notice here we do have a quantity. So this is a live quantity field where we can actually see what's happening. This is a dynamic field as well, if you just manually enter it, it's going to tell you how many you have and at what price. But also, we can break this down if you are using the purchase order system or if these quantities are automatically synced to, to your accounting software.

We'll be able to see exactly what quantity was at which price. And so as you're using it, this is a especially for larger companies, something that is often requested is, well, I want to associate the price that I purchased it at, and we've got different prices depending on when we purchased it. So you can choose if it's first in first out, last in first out. As that comes in, we'll know exactly where we're at in the in the stage for that quantity.

So as you're using that and you're consuming that part, it's gonna associate the cost of that part as we're pulling it out to what the historical was for that exact one. So when we're looking at our our cost of repairs, cost of servicing, it's all gonna have that accurate pricing there, not just a generic or an average price. It will give you the exact price of that part.

We're gonna answer that right now. It looks like a question came up. Can you see price history development of the individual vendors?

That is one thing if we go through here, and change these prices, we will see that in the logs. So I'd be able to go through and as those changes, I can do a quick search or I can I can filter this to a specific type and I can track what those changes were? So I can go back historically and say, okay. I know that Granger is this price now.

What was it a year ago? What was it two years ago? And we can go back and see that that way. Absolutely.

I hope that answers your question. If not, if I need to clarify, throw that back in the q and a. We'll come back to that. So thanks for asking the question.

Okay. Lastly, on this screen that I wanna show you here is minimum quantity thresholds, maximum thresholds, and how do I get alerted if I'm below, my inventory, my reorder point here. So if we just come up to these settings and you do this for every part and by the way, I will say you don't necessarily even have to do this one at a time. We can do this on an Excel file and just upload all those if you're wanting to to manage these all at once and get that into the Limble system here.

So when I come to these settings here, I can choose my minimum threshold, my maximum threshold, as well as a stale threshold if that's, something that's important to you as well. So if you wanna know be notified if maybe you've got a high high ticket item that hasn't been used and, you wanna either get rid of it or figure out something else to do with that, we can we can alert you when that happens. So in this case, right, for this filter, I'm just being notified when I've got less than ten in inventory, and it's gonna notify me, when I'm at that reorder point. So if the technicians are doing their job, adding their parts to their work orders, your your inventory count should be up to date. And, and then when you get to that point, whoever you've designated here will receive that task to to reorder that. So whether it be a manager, parts manager, whoever you want, we can designate that, that assignee.

So what I'm gonna do actually, I didn't need I need to note that on my agenda here is, I wanna show you how now we can get out of inventory and what that looks like. And then we'll come back, and I'm gonna show you what the one of these tasks for the reorder point looks like. I'm just adding that to my notes here. K.

So let's go into a task that I've already created. So if I we're just taking the assumption now that I'm a technician. So I'm going into my manager work screen, and I'm gonna be Tim Whatley here. He's got a quarterly inspection. He's gotta inspect this forklift. Again, this can be any asset.

He'll go through this inspection.

And this is just totally generic, but let's say we come to the point where, okay, I need to add a filter. I wasn't going to add a filter. I'm just inspecting it, but now I've realized this is something I need. Let's go and and add that.

So super easy as a technician. Obviously, I'm on the desktop side or or browser version. It'll look exactly the same on the mobile version as as well, just a little bit more condensed, easier for them to read on the mobile as well, but the the way that they use this is exactly the same. They're just gonna hit this green plus button here.

I've got a couple options when I do that, and I'm gonna click on add part.

So in here, I can see every part, and my permissions are are right now set up where I can also see parts across locations. So let's say this one is across the country. I can see what they've got in stock as well, but that's also permission based as well where you can limit that to maybe a technician only sees what we've got on our location, but a procurement manager or somebody else maybe can see what they've got across across the country or the entire organization as well.

So in addition to finding it this way and going through a long list, you may have hundreds of parts that I don't wanna scroll through. I can also view my associated parts. So any parts that have been used on that asset, I can specifically see that in here as well, and I can select, for example, this oil filter.

Of course, if you wanna go even further, I can search this and just search for filter, and I can see exactly what's coming up from here.

Lastly, one view that you won't see here because I'm on the browser view, but it will come up in the phone, is QR codes or barcodes. We do have a a scanner associated with the Limble app. So you'll have an extra button that will come up on the phone where I it'll open up my camera, and I can scan. So if I'm in my parts room and I know this is the part that I'm taking out, and maybe there's ten that are similar to it, I wanna make sure I've got the right one. I just scan that. It automatically finds it in here for me and adds it to my work order. So, again, that works both with a a QR code, so the two d barcodes as they're referred to sometimes or just a regular traditional barcode, that can be uploaded as a as a field and recognize, what we're looking up there.

So hopefully that helps. For now, I'm just gonna go ahead and click on I'll just do this regular oil filter here. So once I've added that, I can see I can change my quantities. I can maybe add something else. Maybe I will. I'll do one more here, and let's do an air filter as well.

So once that is completed oh, I don't wanna refresh it just now. So once that's completed, I can go ahead and and complete my task here.

You'll notice because it's not I haven't hit complete yet, this is going to be marking those as reserved. But as soon as I hit complete, it's gonna reduce that quantity for me. There. So that's the technician.

That's all they have to do. They could do their regular regular job, click off what they need to do, and just add that part there. And how are we doing on time? Perfect.

So just for these last five minutes, couple things that I wanna show you here is though that reorder ticket as well and the, and the reporting.

Actually, one thing I did forget, I do wanna bring, real quick, is on those parts, because I mentioned the, the bar codes and the QR codes, if I come in here I'm just gonna grab this AC motor. I can actually print these off in bulk as well or individually. So if I've added this, I can just come up here, and there's my QR code. And I can scan, I can put it on a label, put it on my shelving, wherever I need to there as well. If I want to do multiples, I can just click on this, select all of them, and then I can even customize these print options and choose exactly what types of labels that I want so that it's really customized to how how it works best for you. We get those on there, and then, again, technician or yourselves, your managers can just scan those in or out.

Yeah. I do wanna close that.

So like I said, the last two things here, I want to I'm gonna go in and show you what a work order looks like for the reorder point, and then we'll go over reporting and then turn it over to any more questions if you have any.

K. So I'm gonna go back to my manager's work screen, and I do have one here. Actually, I've got a couple here where I've I've got a notice. It's been sent to the manager like I requested, where I can see a minimum, threshold has been hit.

Here's here's what needs to be done. Of course, I'm a great manager. These are almost a month old, but we'll go ahead and order these. So let's do just this belt here.

So if I come in here, I can see exactly what needs to be ordered. If I click on this belt, it'll actually open up, a new tab where I can view all the details of that. That way, I can still stay open on this task, but I'll still be able to reference that if I need to. But the nice thing is Limble will automatically give you a lot of that important data. For example, here's what's currently in stock, what's currently reserved. Here's my reorder point.

So I'm currently under stock by two. And then, here's my default vendor that I can order from. So at this point, there's a couple ways. So you can either go through your own procurement process where you're gonna order those, or if you wanna go through Limble, we give you the option to just start your PO right away here.

And as I click on that, it's automatically gonna generate that. So if you have questions or if you wanna see more about the POs, certainly, ask. We can do another session on that another time, or, you can just reach out to one of us, and we're happy to demo that for you. We just, isn't in the, in the agenda today to specifically go over purchase ordering.

So once we've done that order, we'll just go ahead and mark that complete, and we'll go from there.

Default order quantity, I'm seeing that on the on the QA. Yes. Absolutely. So that order quantity is actually set by your maximum threshold.

By default, it'll order you back up to that point. If you wanna override that and just say it doesn't matter what I'm currently at, I always wanna order fifty or I always wanna order twenty five. We can do that in the background settings as well and set that up for you. So good question there.

K. So finally, last thing here is reporting. We've got all this data. We know what we've got in in stock. We know what we've been doing.

How do we actually track what's coming in and out and what our inventory looks like?

So I'm gonna go for this example, I'm gonna go back to that air filter, and we're gonna start at the ground level. We'll do the five foot view, and then we'll zoom out to the five thousand foot view here.

So this should look familiar. Oh, that was the oil filter. I wanna go back to where is that air filter?

There it is.

Got a little bit more more data in this one. So we're already kinda previewed this log a little bit where we'll be able to see any changes that have happened if it's come out from a task. If I've manually made any changes, it's all gonna be tracked in here. And like I we showed before, I can search through that or I can even filter different types of things so I can see that that history.

The reports tab now is where we can see what is my what's my historical data look like. So in total, I've used this part thirteen times. Here's the total cost that I've spent over those thirteen parts that I've used, as well as your stale status. So if you've got that over the stale threshold, we can see, okay, how many days now are we over that as well, and how often are we using that.

So, great for if you're going through and you're wondering, hey. This is the part. It's getting a little dusty. I've never seen this.

We can look it up and we can see, okay. Here's the last time we've used this.

Here's what it belongs to and really be able to help you organize that and really get rid of, some of the parts that you don't necessarily need or aren't using.

Here's my forecast. So if I've got any, preventative maintenance schedules that are built out that have parts associated with it, we'll be able to see what that looks like, how often we're using it going forward in the future, as well as all the tasks previously that we've looked at. And by the way, these reports are, dynamic, so I can actually click in here and see, okay, that twenty five oh, I apologize. These those ones aren't on our on our assets. They are.

On these ones, I can click into it and see specifically what's coming up. So in that case, right, I can click on those as well as our filters over here.

Best way to start from scratch, vendors or parts?

That is a great question.

I'm gonna hold off on that for now. So Stacy remind me, I just wanna finish out on the reporting side, but then we'll come back. That is a really good question there. K. So that was the five foot view of the part reporting. If I go to the global dashboard, most of this is is obviously gonna be geared towards your your task. But I do see in my cost of operations, one of these breakdowns from our total operating cost, we can see parts.

Again, I can I can filter that by locations and dates and dates and things like that, and I can click into here and see what parts we're using?

But if we wanna get more specific, our custom dashboard that some of you are familiar with, if I come in here, I've got a, dashboard specifically for parts. So I can see at a quick glance, here's what I've got in stock, here's what I've consumed. We can choose those date ranges. So these are reports that you can have ready to go on the fly that are live. So right now, I'm looking at all time, but I can say, you know, maybe I just wanna see this month where are we at on parts consumed, parts in stock.

And then we can also see graphical information with that as well. Like I said before, these are dynamic, so I can click in there and see a breakdown of everything that I've got, everything that we've spent. And it's super easy to set these up.

And, like, if I go to edit this one, it's really just a point and click, and I can filter certain things out, especially with those custom fields that we can create. I can choose to include things, exclude things, and take them out of these reporting as well.

So, again, that was a quick version of our parts. We've just got a few minutes left here. So, of course, if you have any questions, if there's anything that I haven't covered that you were hoping to see today, throw that in the chat, and we'll ask away. So, Stacy, I know that you've got some other questions that I believe were submitted that I don't see here. So I'm gonna answer this one remaining then, if you have some others, let me know, and we'll go from there. But yeah. So that other that last question that came in was, what is the best way to start from scratch?

Vendors or parts? So, it it that's a tough answer to say because, it it is gonna be, come down to you as a specific user.

I will say that in my time, working with our clients doing implementations, it does tend to gravitate towards adding the parts first.

So what would come in is as those are generated or as those parts come in and are put into the system, whether manually by adding the part or importing these, we've got those to come in. Now the nice thing is on that import, we can indicate who the vendors are on that. So it makes it really easy for each part to say who I'm ordering it from. But again, you can also organically do that as you're ordering.

You can throw those vendors in on an as needed basis. But I would say, it's just more common, I think, because people are more focused on what part do I have, and it's a secondary thing for what vendor I've got there. So, hopefully, that answers your question. If you need any more clarification or if if I misunderstood that question, throw that in the chat again.

But I think that's the last question that I see. Stacy, do you have any more questions that were submitted?

Yes. We've got one.

Does Limble offer anything for inventory accounts? I'm not sure if you already actually addressed that or not.

Oh, I don't know. I may have mentioned it, but yes. That's actually a quick answer. We do have we call it cycle counts.

So this may be new to some of you here is super easy and straightforward if you wanna just do a count of your inventory because people are grabbing things without putting them on on their tasks. Pretty simple to do a whatever whatever, time frame you want, whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly where you can configure them or just, see which ones are coming up. And it looks very similar to a task that is assigned to a technician. So I've configured a couple here.

And if I go into this one, so this would show up as a task and it's gonna tell me here's, here's what I'm counting. So this is the part and where it's located and what the current, what the current quantity is at. So as I'm going to do my count, I can just type in what the exact count is and and then go ahead and complete that, and it's gonna automatically update my count there. So nice thing about this is I can also filter that when I do a setup.

I can do maybe one per shelf, one per per room, and I I can filter out types. So as I'm going through rather than having to scan each one as I go, it's in the order that I've set up that I prefer to have it. So I can just go in my line and just write it, write it, write it, and just really makes it super fast and easy and friendly. And as soon as I hit complete, it's gonna update those orders for me or quantities for me.

K. And was sorry. Was that the only question, or were there any others?

I know. We're just over time, but I would like to get to this one.

They asked, can Limble integrate integrate parts with our accounting system?

Yes. Absolutely. So two ways to do that. So we have a direct integration already set up with QuickBooks and, Oracle NetSuite.

So if you're already with those, you can automatically set that up. We can turn that on or or your, customer success manager if you're if you're a client of ours can certainly, help you get that set up. So what that'll do is it'll your quantities, your vendors, all that kind of information can can communicate back and forth. So it's really just one system, where all your numbers are gonna match up.

So if you if you have anything other than QuickBooks or NetSuite, we do have an API where, we'll provide that documentation where you can set up an integration. So, often that's used for is not only just to keep make sure quantity parts are up to date that when I'm adding a part, it's going from one direction to another. So if I add a new part in Limble, it goes to my accounting or vice versa. And then, of course, with PO.

So if I'm ordering something, that is a very common one is Limble, you can create that PO and and either send it directly from Limble to your, to your vendor, or they'll create the PO in Limble that automatically sends it to my internal team, whether it's procurement or, accounting, and they'll they'll complete the purchase process from there. So, nice to have that automatically come, between the between the two systems there.

K. Any other questions or anything else, Stacy, that, I haven't covered that you think I should go over here?

No. I think you've done, an amazing job, Ken. Thank you for attending today's webinar. I hope you found the content Limble, and, we will be sending out this recording should you wanna revisit it or share it with a coworker.

If you'd like to have a personalized walk through of Limble and have some additional questions answered and see if it's the right solution for your organization. You can request a demo by clicking on the purple icon at the bottom of your webinar dashboard or it's right there, off to the right.

Again, thank you for being here. There is an icon to the right. I think it's pink.

That's a survey. I would appreciate any feedback you have on today's content. I read them all, and I implement them into our, our future webinars. And, be on the lookout for our next webinar here with Limble. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Thanks, Ken.

Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

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