EBME Forums Forums Management Medical Equipment Management Management of Parts Stock

In one of my "earlier lives" we used to spend a fair amount of time and effort, not to mention devoting a lot of funds, to the issue of spare parts stock for equipment maintenance. The contract often obliged us to plan for parts for all equipment on inventory (which we would have to draw up, of course), usually forecasting the requirement over the three years ahead. These lists of parts would be agreed by the client, quotes would be obtained, and the parts purchased. We would then have to account for these items, re-stock when used, and hand over the whole lot at the end of the contract. Be sure that considerable amounts of money were involved. Oh, happy days!

In these days of Just-in-Time inventory techniques, Next-Day deliveries and all the rest, plus the tendency to let someone else carry the burden of holding stock, does anybody bother with parts planning and stock control any more, I wonder?

Whilst commissioning a new piece of equipment, when the kit is in your hands, so to speak, do you make a note of the details of the batteries, lamps etc. that you will undoubtedly need to get hold of later (or do you just wait until the inevitable occurs, and scurry around for those details then)?

If you do stock spares, do you account for them, and how do you store them? An organized system, a proper stock control system (or, as I swear I have seen, scattered all over the floor in the "store room")?

Do you have full control over your spares, or are they held centrally, or "by others"? What arrangement do you use:-

1) Individually by stock number
2) Collectively as "spare parts for ... equipment)"
3) With the equipment itself
4) Some other arrangement

Meanwhile, does anyone have any information how (if) the issue of parts stocking is dealt with under PFI schemes?

... I think I'll need to take that as a "no", then.

To answer your questions in the order you asked them ;-

No.

No (Yes).

Yes - once we're sure we really need them.

We control our own.

Option 2)

No.

Does that help ?

Thanks for taking the trouble to respond, Roy (it looks like we haven't heard from you for a couple of years now, more's the pity).

Meanwhile, I still reckon this is an interesting topic. Anyone else care to offer their thoughts on the issue?

we keep a stock of all the parts that we normally go through week on week. Spo2 probes and leads, ecg leads, filters batteries, lamps some cases from companys we know are slow in getting the parts out.

There is the thing of keeping too much stock so we try to limit it.

We control and store our own stock.

The way we look at it a piece of kit is no good in the workshop waiting on bits or hunting through books for the part number.

Better if we had a large database somewhere that we could get the numbers and order the parts through.

Billy

And surely suppliers must get fed up when techs phone up every time they need availability and price of some such item (often the same as the one off they purchased just the week before last)! Something that I've always considered to be a waste of a technician's time, by the way. So our database also needs to record valid quotations. Once again, you would have thought that this would have been another area ripe for standardisation throughout the mighty NHS!

Well where I work we tend to keep a good stock which is well organised in a stock area and replaced it on an individual basis when it is down to one or two. Spares which we assume we can use. Otherwise you spend half your time on EROS ordering spare parts. But I find that you have to be careful because there is no point ordering a load of spare ECG leads for a Kontron 7142 when we only have a couple left and likely to be replaced.

A large database would be a fantastic idea and well recieved!!

sounds like weve got all the bells and whistles.
Stock number on database.
Bin id for stock item on database.
Even link into stock i.d so we can see what goes where.
Link into purchase order so you just put in the stock code and rest defaults into the relevant boxes you just put your quantity to order in (which is suggested, but can be overridden).
All we need now is the staff to keep the system running.

OPTIM does all that and the beauty of it is that one can automatically update the stock database when one uses a part for a job.

Elementary, my dear chap!

And Karl's point is a key one. All efforts are in vain unless the people involved make the effort to keep the whole thing on an even keel.