Rebuilding a Parts Room

Well normally I try to do everything in phases just due to the impact that it makes. This time around I have had to do a little here and there quite simply because there is just so much to do. I am close to completion of the parts room with really only organizing the parts and painting the floor left to go. It is such a huge impact I felt that it would be a good focus for this weeks blog update.

The parts room on arrival was typical of many facilities I have witnessed with a lot of chaos. I spent the first few weeks really just trying to watch how my staff work so I could see what the routines are and see some immediate areas I could make an impact to save time and of course money. One of these areas was the parts room. As you can see in the pictures below it was cluttered, dark, and no one knew where anything was. The big issue was we were ordering parts that eventually I found on the shelves and that is just senseless spending.

To start with we went through all parts bins and threw away old parts and parts that were on the shelves in which we had no equipment for. Then we separated parts by brand with Toro in red bins, John Deere in green, Club Car and other brands in blue and yellow contain miscellaneous items such as tines for aerification, springs, gas caps, etc. This was somewhat done when I arrived but was not consistent. I ordered a few more shelves as well. I then took a look at the nut and bolt bins as well as the hardware drawers and we had tons of stuff we either didn’t need were the wrong sizes or was incomplete. I have started by replacing the nut and bolt bins and having them properly labeled and will change out the drawers as it fits the budget and makes budgetary sense. We then changed the color of the parts room from a Dark Blue to and egg shell white. I went with white for a reason we needed a lot more light in the room. To save the company money adding more lights we brought in this color and the brightness of the room has went up significantly enough that we don’t need to add lighting. We also built in more peg board walls to accommodate the large amount of belts and cables that they had in stock. Those who are reading this please remember to not stock up large amounts of items it is just money sitting on the shelf. Most of the belts have been here for years and still not used and it is such a waste.

Our next steps are to go through our bins and separate parts by the type of machine such as John Deere 2500B or Toro 4500. This will allow us to quickly find parts on the shelf for a particular machine. We will also be working on recording our inventory once they are all arranged to not only know what we have in our computer system but to also have an idea of how much money we have sitting in the parts room. One thing I did for the first time at this property was work out a Deere with Austin Turf “our John Deere dealer” on a consignment bin. This bin allows us to store high use items as well as parts that we may need on hand for our PGA event without paying for them until we use them. This is a way to have parts on hand but not having a large burden on your budget for parts that sit on the shelves. I can see more of this in the future as its a great way to save money from stocking parts.