Case study
One queue, at a large UK food manufacturing site.
This is the kind of site Parts Requester is built for: a UK food manufacturing site, where two stores people serve twenty-one engineers. That ratio is the whole story, the fewer stores people there are, the more the queue has to answer for them.
Before: Excel, post-its and WhatsApp
Parts got ordered the way they get ordered nearly everywhere. In the words of the maintenance manager: "Excel sheets, post-its, WhatsApp groups, and occasionally someone yelling across the workshop." A request would arrive as "fix pump", which isn't a work order, it's a riddle. Once people stopped trusting the system, they started keeping their own notes, and the queue fell apart.
After: parts, tools and PPE on one queue
An engineer raises a request from the machine with a photo. Stores puts a supplier, a price, a PO number and an ETA on it. Everyone on site reads the same screen until someone fits the part, and who fitted it and when is kept against their name. Tools and PPE run through the same queue, so there's one set of habits instead of three.
The numbers
Across the reference site's first 286 part requests, 238 have closed as fitted, with a name against each one. The loop doesn't end when the part arrives; it ends when the machine is running again.
The number that matters most is the split. Every request is tagged planned, breakdown or consumable when it's raised, and it came out at 159 planned, 102 breakdown, 25 consumable. Moving spend out of the breakdown column, from firefighting to buying ahead of need, is where the money is, and the product has been recording that ratio from day one.
How 286 requests split
"No orders get lost any more. We used to lose orders every week, an engineer would just leave a post-it note, or a ripped piece of cardboard with a badly written part on it, on my desk. This makes my life so much easier."
What it costs
£399 a site a month, or £3,990 a year, every user included, no seat counting. Thirty-day trial, no card, and your first paid month is money-back if the team isn't using it.