Across global production environments, the process of buying, storing, and using MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) parts remains inefficient, expensive, and fragmented. The result is a growing disconnect between what companies spend and the value they get in return.
New survey data from The MRO strategy gap: The overlooked lever for margin growth reveals a striking contrast. While 48% of procurement executives cite high inventory spend as a top challenge, including 61% in the United States, 32% of operations leaders report frequent stockouts of critical spare parts. These two realities, when placed side by side, point to a shared underlying issue: a lack of visibility into what inventory is actually available, where it is located, and whether it can be accessed when needed.
Figure 1: Top MRO challenges currently faced by teams & Figure 2: Top MRO challenges currently faced by procurement and
supply chain teams*
*Both questions allowed more than one answer and as a result, percentages will add up to more than 100%
The problem is clear: procurement and operations teams are both dealing with the consequences of poor MRO management, but from different angles.
On one hand, procurement leaders are under pressure to manage costs and reduce excess inventory. Yet without clear, centralized inventory data across all sites, they often end up buying parts at a high price or purchasing parts that already exist elsewhere in the organization. These decisions drive up total inventory spend while offering little added value.
On the other hand, operations teams are tasked with ensuring uptime and avoiding delays caused by missing parts. But despite the volume of parts in stock, many still report stockouts of critical items. Often, the part they need may even exist somewhere in the system, but it is just not visible, accessible, or properly categorized.
This results in emergency purchases, production delays, and unnecessary downtime. The irony is clear: teams are surrounded by inventory, yet lack the right part at the right time to keep machines running.
At the center of the problem is a lack of reliable, accessible spare parts data. Inventory systems across manufacturing sites are often fragmented, outdated, or managed locally. Many companies rely on spreadsheets, isolated ERP modules, or manual processes to track spare parts. As a result, there is no single source of truth for MRO inventory across the organization.
This leads to duplication, inconsistent naming conventions, and limited ability to optimize stock levels. It also prevents effective collaboration between procurement and maintenance teams, who often work with entirely different information sets.
The impact of this fragmentation is twofold. First, it creates financial inefficiencies. Excess stock consumes working capital and increases carrying costs, all while failing to improve readiness. Second, it drives operational risk. Stockouts mean downtime, lost productivity, and reactive spending, all of which could be avoided with better planning and transparency.
This is not simply a case of misalignment between departments. The disconnect is structural and systemic. In many organizations, MRO responsibilities are split across functions, regions, and business units. There is often no centralized ownership or consistent process for cataloging, purchasing, and sharing spare parts across sites.
As organizations grow, these problems scale with them. The more production sites and supplier relationships a company manages, the harder it becomes to coordinate inventory strategy without dedicated systems. Local teams make local decisions, and visibility across the network disappears.
Even where efforts are made to standardize, outdated systems and inconsistent data make it difficult to identify which parts are truly needed, and which are already sitting on a shelf somewhere else.
Closing the gap between spend and availability starts with building shared visibility across teams and sites. Procurement and operations teams need access to the same data, updated in real time and standardized across sites. With better visibility, procurement can avoid unnecessary purchases, and maintenance teams can access what they need faster.
This includes:
The goal is not to stock more “just in case”, but to enable smarter, data-driven decisions that ensure the right parts are available when and where they’re needed, without excess or delay. With clean spare parts data and visibility in place, companies can reduce costs, prevent downtime, and avoid buying what they already own. The goal is not just to reduce inventory spend or eliminate stockouts in isolation, but to address the system-level inefficiencies that enable both.
The fact that procurement and operations are struggling with two sides of the same issue is not just a coincidence — it is a signal. High inventory spend and critical part shortages are not isolated problems. They are the result of poor coordination, fragmented data, and a lack of shared visibility across the MRO function.
Fixing this disconnect does not require more inventory or more spend. It requires better alignment, cleaner data, and the tools to enable both.
Our recent report examines the challenges facing MRO in the manufacturing industry today. Download it now to learn: