According to a recent study by Hexa Research, the personal care products market is about to see explosive growth. This fragmented industry is dominated by some heavy-hitters like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, L’Oréal Group, Estée Lauder, Johnson & Johnson and Colgate Palmolive. And with companies trying to expand their global presence through mergers & acquisitions, the risk to production reliability is increased.
It is at times like these that we recommend manufacturers take a look at their maintenance, repair and operations strategy and ensure it’s aligned to support reliable production and future growth.
It means taking a look at your cash-flow management from a production perspective. What are the standard operating procedures, inventory management strategies, and critical spares management tools you have in place to ensure your MRO supply is getting where you need it, when you need it? It means looking at inbound logistics, spend analytics and supplier relationship management to ensure you’re leveraging your purchasing power to create the maximum value for your production facilities. And it means taking a hard look at your asset life optimization approach. Do you have asset criticality processes clearly defined? Have root cause failure analysis been performed on your MRO spares and what component re-engineering needs to occur to ensure the optimal life cycle for your assets?
Of course, all of the asset optimization, spend leverage and cash flow management in the world won’t help your growth strategy if you don’t have the systems and actionable data to support it. When companies approach us and ask us how to better align their MRO and maintenance strategies for projected growth, we always recommend they start by taking a look at what is working well and what could use improvement. Perform a gap analysis to walk through how material is currently requisitioned and issued, as well as the sourcing, purchasing and back-office support processes. This will give you the compelling reasons to change your approach and align your MRO strategies to your production reliability, for improved uptime and throughput.
Get started. Learn about SDI’s Supply Chain Evaluation.
