Strategies for efficiently managing IT assets - Part 2
This is in continuation to my previous blog on Strategies for efficiently managing IT assets i.e. maintaining standby assets at service provider sites nearest to client locations and analyzing the part failure history from immediate past.
Another key strategy is to replenish spare parts on a regular basis. If you are managing assets with different make, model, specification then you do not have to replenish stock for the entire list of spares associated with those assets because, that increases your inventory carrying cost of those spare parts and all of those parts are also not required through service requests. The cost effective way to replenish is to extract the list of service requests which have part replacements, then analyze which are the parts that are replaced and then find out the quantity replaced. You can then sort the list of spare parts by quantity replaced and can find out which are the parts for which the quantity replaced is higher. It is better to use the Pareto Analysis here (i.e. top 20% of spare parts that needs to be replenished to resolve the 80% of part failures (or demands) and then you can plan for replenishing those stocks regularly. This will help in meeting your SLAs for most of the service requests on time.
Next key strategy is about forecasting the spare parts which have a longer lead-time. If you get a service request for a specific spare part which is needed immediately and if the normal procurement time is in weeks, then it affects your SLA and increases the downtime of the asset. These kinds of parts can have a specific configuration or it can have a specific make. So, you can analyze the trend of failure for these kinds of parts and then can procure a minimum required quantity to keep in stock. For example, dependency on the network printer is high from operations perspective and the service request for a network printer failure can be of high priority and high severity. If there is a spare part for a network printer which is of a specific make and the usual lead time is 3 weeks, then procuring such parts in advance will help you in resolving these high priority and high severity service requests.
My next blog will cover the other key strategies including reducing the time to respond and time to resolve for service requests and establishing a well developed courier network for tracking spare parts delivery.
