Pressure Gauge Woes May Signal Need to Streamline

You seldom think about your plant’s stockroom until something goes wrong. When everything’s in its place and everybody’s finding what they need to keep operations running smoothly, there’s not much to worry about. Then a glitch finds its way into your supply chain system. You see that certain pressure gauges have failed repeatedly in your processing operation. The problem stumps everybody until a technician figures out that somewhere down the line, the wrong pressure gauge was grabbed off the shelf and was installed to do a job it wasn’t designed for. Inevitably, it malfunctioned. And it turns out that the operators on duty have continued to replace it with the wrong pressure gauge —again and again. To make matters worse, the stockroom supervisor has ordered plenty of extras because the gauges keep failing prematurely. Finally, you have to halt production until you get the right pressure gauge installed. These things can happen when people neglect little things like a supply room or big things like the supply chain system. Taking inventory of a stockroom usually isn’t high on anyone’s list of favorite chores. However, it is one of those proverbial “somebody’s-got-to-do-it” tasks. Losing control of what’s in a storeroom can lead to less-than-optimal supply chain management and a missed opportunity to enhance productivity and profitability. Look inside your facility’s storeroom, and you’re apt to discover a cache of the wrong parts and more unwelcome surprises. When considering just the stocking and restocking of incorrect pressure gauges, you could be incurring thousands of dollars in unnecessary expenditures — not counting the shipping costs, lost production volume, and wasted work hours for the maintenance team. Faced with all you have to do to keep your operation running without hiccups, where might you start to prevent this from happening? A good place would be simplifying your plant’s storeroom by standardizing your pressure gauges. By streamlining what you have on hand and the process for reordering products, you can eliminate a major source of confusion for stockroom employees, front-line operators, and managers. WIKA’s Full Audit Service Team (FAST) provides instrument and storeroom audits to help you standardize your pressure gauge needs to eliminate hard and soft costs from your supply chain. Your time is too valuable—and so is your plant’s—to waste it on incorrect pressure gauges or other supply chain issues. Get FAST, to help.