The Benefits of Having Spare Parts On Hand

Some business owners assume that it is more cost-effective to not keep spare parts for their loading dock safety systems, dock levelers, and communications systems on hand. Many facilities – and much of this comes from the accounting department looking at the current bottom line and not at the bigger picture – may risk productivity in the interest of saving the company money in the short-term.

If nothing breaks, then you are in good shape. But what if something does break, and you don’t have the spare parts on hand to fix it? What will it cost you compared to the cost of maintaining an inventory of spare parts for your loading docks?

Loading docks are the hubs of many facilities, so having to shut even one loading dock down because the equipment is broken and there are no spare parts on hand to fix it can be costly to your operation.

Although parts for the broken loading dock equipment can be ordered, it may take valuable time to get them. The lost productivity and revenue can often be measured in thousands of dollars a day. Let’s break this down within the warehouse and production area:

Let’s say you have four loading docks. Two loading docks are designated for receiving products into the facility, and two loading docks are designated for shipping products out of the facility. A part breaks on a loading dock leveler at one of your shipping loading docks, and you have to wait for the part to come in to fix it.

This cuts the amount the facility can ship in half. So, if you usually load products to ship on ten trucks a day at each dock for a total of twenty vehicles, you can now send only ten truckloads a day. Many times, this means that some production lines are shut down because there’s nowhere to store the finished goods. Both the limited amount of shipments and shut down production lines now means that customers will not get their products on time.

And, in the age of speedy delivery, customers will not accept late shipments, and many will call and cancel their orders and go to a competitor. So, you’ve lost revenue from sales, you’ve lost production time (and those employees have lost money because they’ve been idled), and you are inevitably behind on current customer orders and shipments, even with cancellations. 

That’s why you should always have spare parts on hand for your loading docks. While spare parts may seem expensive at the outset to sit in inventory just in case something goes wrong, they will cost you much, much less than what shutting down a loading dock and waiting for parts to be delivered could cost you.

Call Us Today

Parts Brite can help you maintain a spare parts inventory so that your facility doesn’t have to experience an extended loss of a loading dock. We sell only top-quality aftermarket parts. We have a complete line of dock parts that can fulfill the specific needs of your facility. We have our sales office in California, but we have distribution warehouses in Wisconsin and California so that we can quickly ship dock parks anywhere in the United States. Contact us at 1-855-PARTSBRITE (1-855-727-8727).