Kitting and Staging of Parts – Practical advice

Kitting and staging of parts is a supporting character in overall maintenance efficiency. Tom Odden, with IDCON Scandinavia is giving you practical advice to improve this vital, and often overlooked, process.

What is a Work Kit?

A work kit is a collection of materials that maintenance needs to complete a work order to a required standard. Many plants with good work order systems do not use work kits, however, they are necessary to achieve maximum maintenance effectiveness and can have great value if properly controlled. This should be the responsibility of the storeroom.

How does Kitting and Staging of parts work?

In many cases parts for kits can be supplied as OEM packaging kits. Work kits should be stored in suitable containers, labeled with the work order number and kept in a secure place until the work is scheduled to be done. This is the “Kitting” part.

Kitting and staging of parts
This is an example of a good kitting area

Staging is when the work has been scheduled, and the work kits delivered to the job site or to an appropriate staging area. Many plants do not have a delivery system, and depend on their tradespeople to gather up their own materials. This is generally not a good use of this limited and expensive resource, but it is better than having a poorly-managed work kit and delivery system.

What’s the benefit?

The key benefit is the reduction of wasted time of maintenance team members trying to find the right parts or waiting in line to pick up parts.

Good kitting and staging helps reduce wasted time
A line outside storeroom after morning break. If parts were kitted and delivered to the job site you would eliminate this bottleneck.

For more practical advice for Reliability-based Spare parts and materials management, buy our book at shop-idcon.com or join our next training course.

Not sure how well your organization performs Materials and Spare Parts Management? Contact us for a Deep Dive Assessment into the process

At IDCON, we understand the pressure you face trying to build a reliable plant.
We provide side-by-side reliability and maintenance consulting and training designed to keep your equipment running.

For over 45 years, we’ve partnered with 100s of manufacturing plants around the world to eliminate the costs and the pressure caused by unreliable equipment. And we’d love to do the same for you.

Contact us today to see how we can help you keep your plant running.

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Tom Oden

Tom Oden

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