What is MRO? Maintenance, Repair, Operations - A Full Guide

Successful manufacturing companies must implement a proper maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) strategy to ensure its facilities are operating smoothly.

What is Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO)?

Why is MRO Important?

MRO impacts an organization in several critical ways, including cost management, productivity, and procurement.

• Maintenance Costs: It goes without saying that maintaining equipment is essential to prevent frequent breakdowns and incurring associated high costs. When maintenance is neglected, the frequency of asset failures increases, leading to expensive repairs, production halts, defective products, idle workforce, and lost business opportunities. Additionally, poor maintenance shortens machinery lifespan, forcing companies to decide between costly replacements or frequent repairs. Maintenance activities, whether outsourced or handled internally, also involve significant material and supply costs.
• Inventory Control: Effective MRO management involves meticulous control over the purchasing and stocking of materials, supplies, and parts. Often, maintenance staff may over-purchase to avoid running out of essential MRO items, leading to wasted resources and cluttered storage spaces. Poor organization can also result in unnecessary reorders of items already in stock. Conversely, not having parts available when needed — stockouts — extends downtime and increases repair costs, sometimes necessitating expedited shipping or interim fixes.
• Plant Productivity: Reactive maintenance, which waits for assets to fail before addressing issues, results in excessive and avoidable downtime. Without proper maintenance documentation, teams might perform unnecessary or counterproductive work, causing further delays and production backlogs. Stockouts also halt maintenance and repairs, leading to production stoppages and idle operators. When this happens, you miss targets and key performance indicators (KPIs).

While MRO maintenance can help address the challenges in all these areas, it’s important to understand the distinct types of MRO.

4 Types of MRO, With Examples

Maintenance, repair, and operations products and materials are essential for the upkeep and efficient functioning of industrial and manufacturing facilities. These MRO items include spare parts, safety equipment, and cleaning supplies, which, while not directly involved in the production process, are vital for maintaining operations and physical assets.

Repair and Service Tools

Tools required for maintenance tasks include hand tools and power tools like hammers, drills, screwdrivers, and saws. For specialized areas, lawn care equipment may also be included.

Safety Equipment and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Safety gear like fire extinguishers, gas detectors, and PPE such as hard hats, goggles, gloves, and safety boots ensure workplace safety.

Consumables

Common consumables are limited-use MRO items including cleaning supplies, fasteners, greases, lubricants, and even basic office supplies.

Unlike materials and large production equipment, these MRO inventory items can be easily lost or damaged. That’s why proper MRO management is important for consumables, too.

Industrial Equipment
This includes manufacturing equipment like pumps, valves, motors, and compressors, along with their spare parts. Segregating them by criticality can enhance management efficiency.

Material Handling Equipment Maintenance

To move raw materials through the production process and out to shipping, plants need effective material handling equipment — typically heavy machinery. Examples of material handling equipment include conveyer systems, forklifts, robotic arms, pallet positioners, and bulk containers.

Maintenance on these MRO items usually focuses on reduced idle time.

Production Equipment Repair and Maintenance

The focus of this MRO category is to prevent production process disruptions. With MRO best practices for your production equipment, you can minimize raw material waste and reduce equipment downtime.

Infrastructure Repair and Maintenance

While proper facility maintenance is crucial, the entire property needs attention. Facility infrastructure repair includes upkeep to your immediate facility as well as the grounds surrounding your operations.

Janitorial services, lighting and HVAC servicing, pest control, and landscaping may not be considered high-priority items. Most likely, your facility can operate even when these tasks fall behind. But by including these MRO items in your infrastructure repair priorities, you’ll optimize performance, keep employees comfortable, and avoid downtime.

We’ve covered the types and importance of MRO products and materials. Now let’s dive into the strategies that can make your MRO practices more effective.

What Is MRO Inventory Management?

When it comes to the tools and supplies your MRO strategy requires, both inventory shortages and overstock can create issues.

So, why exactly is MRO inventory management important? Not having enough MRO inventory can impact efficiency, jeopardize deadlines, and harm customer relationships. Meanwhile, having more MRO inventory than you need monopolizes storage space and harms profitability. That’s why effective MRO inventory management is essential to your operation.

MRO inventory management strategies vary based on many factors, including industry, size, data analysis methods, and company goals. Inventory management software can show you inefficiencies, gaps, and pitfalls in current practices. With new insights, you can make positive changes for efficient MRO inventory management.

Now that we understand the main types of MRO, let’s look at common strategies.

3 MRO Management Strategies in the Manufacturing Industry

MRO-related maintenance can be broken down into three main categories: corrective, preventive, and predictive maintenance (though, increasingly, many MRO teams are looking to condition-based maintenance strategies as well).

• Corrective Maintenance: Corrective maintenance involves repairing equipment or facilities that have already failed or malfunctioned. This type of maintenance is typically reactive (unplanned), so it can result in significant downtime and increased costs. Corrective maintenance is often necessary for unexpected failures, but it should not be the primary focus of your MRO strategy.
• Preventive Maintenance: Preventive maintenance involves scheduled maintenance and inspections of equipment and infrastructure aimed at preventing breakdowns and extending asset lifespans. This type of maintenance is proactive and can help reduce downtime and lower costs by identifying and addressing potential issues before they become significant problems. A successful preventive maintenance program ensures your organization’s storerooms and technicians always have the right materials in the right place at the right time.
• Predictive Maintenance: Predictive maintenance involves using data and analytics to predict when maintenance will be required in the future. Any MRO strategy can be greatly improved by deploying advanced tools and sensors (such as vibration sensors from Fluke Reliability) to continuously and effortlessly monitor the health of mission-critical assets. Such data-collection tools can also be paired with CMMS software like eMaint. This gives maintenance teams access to both real-time and historical data and trends, which enables the identification of potential issues before they become problems, ultimately increasing productivity.

Proper attention to predictive maintenance is the key to long-term, sustainable increases in productivity. However, equally important to understanding these maintenance strategies is knowing the various products and materials that support MRO activities.

The Benefits of MRO

The use of MRO best practices and technologies can drive numerous benefits that positively impact almost every aspect of your manufacturing facility:

• Minimize Unplanned Downtime: One malfunctioning piece of equipment can disrupt the entire production line, leading to costly downtime. An effective MRO strategy allows organizations to plan routine maintenance, during off-peak times, such as between shifts or at the end of production runs, keeping facilities operational and minimizing disruptions. This leads to higher production rates, improved overall efficiency, and increased profits.
• Improve Worker Safety: Maintaining assets and organizing work areas helps address and eliminate safety hazards. A clean and well-maintained facility reduces the risk of accidents, injuries, and other safety incidents, ensuring a safer work environment for all employees. This not only protects workers but also reduces the costs associated with workplace injuries and accidents.
• Avoid Stockouts and Overstocking: A meticulous and automated approach to MRO ensures that facilities know exactly when to replenish their MRO equipment, tools, and products.. This prevents both stockouts and overstock, optimizing MRO inventory management and ensuring that necessary MRO items are always available without overcrowding the stockroom.
• Reduce Repair Times: If spare parts, tools, and other supplies are readily available and organized, it reduces the time required for maintenance tasks and repairs. Additionally, advanced MRO solutions can help organizations plan and prioritize maintenance tasks efficiently, minimizing travel between assets or locations and further enhancing productivity.
• Maintain Compliance: Many industries and regions have stringent regulations related to occupational health and safety, environmental standards, and equipment upkeep. A comprehensive MRO strategy ensures that industrial equipment is well-maintained, serviced, and compliant with these regulations. This is especially important for highly regulated industries such as aerospace, government, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), where noncompliance can result in significant penalties and operational disruptions.

These benefits have a cascading impact across all areas of your operation. And by following a few simple best practices, you can maximize that impact.

Best Practices to Make MRO More Efficient

Maintenance, repair, and operations management is essential for success, but you must harness the right strategies, schedule, and tools (including MRO software). A haphazard or inconsistent approach can lead to delays, downtime, and thin margins. So, try these methods to streamline your MRO processes.

Develop a Comprehensive MRO Plan

Any effective MRO strategy involves having a comprehensive plan that outlines the maintenance, repair, and replacement activities required to maintain equipment, facilities, and operations. That plan should include a schedule of preventive maintenance activities, as well as a process for handling unexpected failures.

Use Data and Analytics to Manage MRO

Data and analytics can provide valuable insights into equipment and facility performance, allowing manufacturers to identify potential issues before they become problems. By electronically capturing equipment and facility data, organizations can implement a predictive MRO strategy that gives maintenance teams and leadership the information they need to make data-driven decisions about repairs and replacements.

Improve Your MRO Procurement Process

MRO procurement is the process of purchasing products and supplies for your maintenance, repair, and operations tasks. This includes managing MRO inventory such as tools, equipment, consumables, and more.

With so many maintenance supplies to manage, tracking inventory is challenging. It’s easy to overspend and overstock. Data analysis is essential to understand your MRO spending relative to actual use, the right schedule for MRO procurement, and where you can save money. The right MRO software can provide valuable insights like these to improve your MRO procurement process.

Use Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI), an Effective MRO Inventory Management System

Managing your entire MRO inventory internally can be a big challenge. It’s not only complex and time-consuming, but it can even be risky. That’s because different suppliers have varying purchase requirements, order minimums, lead times, and more.

With so much to manage, it’s easy to run out of office supplies and other products while you wait for orders to arrive. But vendor-managed inventory allows suppliers to access your inventory management software. They’ll decide when you need to restock and place the orders themselves. This can reduce shortages and streamline operations.

Invest in Maintenance Management Training and Development

Properly maintaining and repairing equipment and facilities requires specialized knowledge and skills. Investing in training and development for maintenance staff can help ensure they have the skills they need to effectively perform necessary maintenance and repair activities.

Use Technology to Streamline Your MRO Program 

Technology can play a significant role in improving any MRO strategy. Manufacturers can use technology to automate maintenance tasks, monitor equipment and facility performance, and streamline the repair and replacement process. All MRO-related activities should also be documented, which can help reveal trends and potential issues early.

Deploying MRO software makes it much easier to keep consistent, accurate documentation. And with robust, comprehensive CMMS software, like eMaint, you get everything you need in one central tool.

How Does CMMS MRO Software Improve Operations?

The functionalities a CMMS offers facility managers can significantly simplify and elevate the MRO process. Here’s how:

• Access Centralized Data Storage: A CMMS securely stores all your maintenance data in the cloud, making it easily searchable and accessible. This centralized data repository keeps all relevant information at your fingertips, improving efficiency and decision-making.
• Schedule and Track Preventive Maintenance: CMMS software helps schedule and track work orders, ensuring that maintenance tasks are performed on time and according to plan. This minimizes unplanned downtime and keeps your operations running smoothly.
• Manage Assets: With a CMMS, you can account for assets across all your facilities, maintaining a detailed record of each asset’s maintenance history and real-time status. This visibility helps you manage your assets more effectively and extend their lifespans.
• Streamline Inventory Management and Supply Chain Management: A CMMS tracks MRO inventory levels, ensuring that you always have the necessary spare parts, tools, and consumables on hand. This prevents stockouts and reduces the risk of overstocking, optimizing inventory costs and availability.
• Improve Your Decision-Making: Analyze asset performance to identify which assets are costing the most money and why, enabling better maintenance decisions.

By leveraging all these features, a CMMS can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your MRO strategy.

Here’s an example to illustrate: NARENCO, a renewable energy company, improved MRO visibility and operational efficiency by leveraging eMaint CMMS to manage over 4,000 assets across 36 sites, completing over 5,500 preventive maintenance tasks and nearly 2,000 corrective work orders in a single year. This level of detailed management and visibility was crucial for NARENCO’s growth and operational efficiency.

These results aren’t an isolated occurrence. Your organization can reap the benefits of MRO optimization, too.

By committing to an MRO strategy that focuses on preventive and predictive maintenance, employee training, and technology-driven data collection and documentation, your organization will ensure all equipment, tools, and facilities are as well-maintained and productive as possible.

What Is MRO? FAQs

What Does MRO Mean?

MRO stands for maintenance, repair, and operations. It encompasses all the activities within your business that have to do with regular upkeep, routine repairs, and replacement of your assets. That includes tools, equipment, and facilities necessary for your daily operations.

What Does MRO Mean in Purchasing?

MRO purchasing, also known as MRO procurement, is the process of acquiring the supplies you need to perform maintenance, repair, and operations tasks. In that way, it’s distinct from the supplies you use in the production process.

What Is the Difference Between OEM and MRO?

OEM stands for “original equipment manufacturer.” In manufacturing, this refers to your company, as you create your own products.

On the other hand, MRO stands for “maintenance, repair, and operations,” which are the systems, processes, and tools used to keep a production facility running.