Recently, in a series of unconnected conversations, I was struck by how each speaker focused on some specific aspect of spare parts management that, to them, indicated how well (or poorly) they were doing in this area.
For example, viewing a single event (such as a stock out) as being representative of their entire inventory – “it’s all a mess”.
Or being super confident in their process/skills when it was clear, to me at least, that they should be doing something different – “we apply formula X”.
Another example: not seeing the range of options that were open to them and only considering what’s been done in the past – “here’s the way we handle this”.
This got me thinking about the biases that we can bring to our spare parts inventory, the effect of these on how much inventory is held, and how well it serves its purpose.
