Partsmaster Featured in Food Processing Magazine

Partsmaster Stands Apart in MRO Replenishment

For the past several years, Partsmaster has been helping the U.S. military maintain equipment like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle through comprehensive MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) service.

Now Partsmaster is making that level of disciplined, organized service available to food & beverage plants. 

Partsmaster recently initiated the “Repair & Operations Center (ROC)” for its civilian customers, many of whom are food & beverage processors. Simply put, this concept embodies a degree of service that will relieve plant personnel of the burden of managing and replenishing inventories for virtually all of their MRO supplies. 

Partsmaster is a premier MRO solutions company, established in 1968 as a division of NCH Corp., a leading provider of industrial goods since 1919. Its exclusive brands run the gamut from abrasives to welding and include Cryotool, a line of cutting tools treated cryogenically for extra strength.

Drawing on Partsmaster’s extensive experience in servicing the food & beverage industry, the ROC makes total inventory management available for the full range of Partsmaster products, including tools of all kinds, fasteners, chemicals, repair compounds, pipe and fittings and much more — the full panoply of MRO supplies and equipment.

Customized plans for the ROC are available for plants of all sizes. Under these plans, Partsmaster will visit a plant as often as necessary to gauge inventory and place the necessary orders to ensure that the supply of a needed MRO product will never run out.

The visits are the last stage in a customization process that begins with a careful assessment of the plant’s needs. 

In fact, the whole program began with an industry-wide assessment of what food plants need from MRO suppliers, says Partsmaster CEO David Weiss. 

“A lot of companies have the parts and the different components that these companies need, but the one big thing that they all said to us that they were lacking from the MRO companies in the [food & beverage] industry was reliability, dependability, and service to the customers,” Weiss says.

When Partsmaster sets up the ROC program, it starts with a comprehensive survey of the facility. 

“When we go in to take over MRO supplies in a food and beverage shop, we need to really understand what are the biggest problems that they have and what sort of products are they using,” Weiss says.

A Partsmaster representative goes into all the plant’s departments, talking with managers, floor personnel, purchasing agents and everyone else involved in MRO.

One of the most important aspects of the initial assessment is how MRO storage is laid out.

“Some factories might have all their MRO [supplies] together in one place. The maintenance team will go there and find what they need.” Weiss says. “There are some plants where there are different pieces of these MRO shops, set up based upon where they’re doing the work, or where the maintenance happens.” 

No matter what is needed, or where, the core of the ROC is regular visits from Partsmaster field agents, to monitor and replenish supplies as needed.

The initial survey determines whether these visits should be monthly, weekly or even more often.

“We really try to become part of their maintenance team, and it’s our job to make sure that they don’t run out of the things they need to keep their factories running,” Weiss says.

“We’re going to make a promise to these food and beverage customers. We’re going to keep them running better than anybody else, we want to lower their total cost of operations, and we want to provide reliability and expert service.”