Inside MRO – Blog Series Part 1

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Spare parts and MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) often live in the shadows of supply chain strategy—until something breaks. From unplanned downtime to bloated inventory, the decisions companies make (or avoid) about spare parts have a direct impact on operational performance, working capital, and service levels. And yet, MRO remains one of the most underdeveloped, siloed, and misunderstood areas in asset-heavy industries.

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In this 5-part blog series, Inside MRO: Lessons from the Frontlines of Spare Parts Strategy, we explore what it takes to transform spare parts from a reactive afterthought into a strategic advantage. At the center is Andrew Jordan — a globally experienced supply chain executive, CEO, and MRO transformation professional whose career has spanned multinational manufacturers, global consultancies, and some of the industry's most specialised MRO technology providers.

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Andrew Jordan is the former CEO of Xtivity, where he led MRO optimization programs across North America for nearly seven years. He also served as Head of Operations at Novartis Consumer Health, and Director of Customer Service & Supply at Diageo. With over two decades of experience across Capgemini, Ernst & Young UK, and his own firms — including Jordan & Associates Management Consulting and Triskell Consulting — Andrew Jordan brings a uniquely comprehensive view of both direct and indirect supply chains. He has worked with manufacturers across life sciences, food & beverage, and industrial sectors to modernise how they manage their assets, their data, and their spare parts.

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In this series, he shares what he's learned about why spare parts matter more than most leaders realise, and how to fix what’s broken.

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Here’s what you’ll gain from the series:

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• Post 1 – Follow Andrew Jordan’s shift into the world of spare parts and discover why poor master data—not process or tools—is the number one reason MRO strategies fail before they start.
  
  
• Post 2 – Understand how cultural neglect has turned MRO into a dead-end function—and why that’s quietly costing companies uptime, talent, and control.
  
  
• Post 3 – See what “good” looks like in practice through real-world examples of companies that have transformed their spare parts strategies through discipline, governance, and leadership alignment.
  
  
• Post 4 – Learn why ERP systems often fall short, how to avoid automating bad decisions, and which supporting tools can make a measurable impact.
  
  
• Post 5 – Get a clear-eyed look at how AI and analytics can improve MRO decision-making—not by replacing people, but by giving them better data and sharper insights.
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The Early Days: Finished Goods and Customer Focus

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Andrew Jordan spent the bulk of his early career in the world of direct procurement and customer delivery. He was responsible for managing finished goods across vast warehouse networks, ensuring product availability, and keeping service levels high for household brands. At Diageo and Novartis, he dealt in scale—tens of millions of dollars of inventory, and finely tuned planning models.

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“I was responsible for finished goods and the deployment of that across the multi-echelon warehouse network.”

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The work was complex, but it was clear: focus on demand, optimise inventory, and deliver to the customer. What he didn’t realise at the time was how deeply all of that depended on something hidden further upstream—asset reliability, and by extension, spare parts.

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“I would tangentially hear the stories like, ‘Well, the machine is down.’ I thought to myself, why is the machine down?”

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Like many supply chain professionals on the direct side, he assumed the spare parts and MRO side was “under control”—someone else’s responsibility. Until he saw the same patterns reappear again and again.

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The Shift: From Curiosity to Calling

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After launching his own consulting business, Jordan began helping companies optimise finished goods inventory. In the process, he encountered tools like ToolsGroup and later Xtivity that could optimise inventory based on service levels, lead times, and demand variability. But even with these tools, clients struggled. Something wasn’t clicking.

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The problem? Their spare parts were a mess. Catalogs were bloated. Descriptions were inconsistent. Maintenance teams and spare parts procurement teams weren’t speaking the same language. Jordan realised that even the best inventory tools were useless if the foundation was broken.

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“There was an opportunity to do some things that had been proven [on the direct side]... that could be extended and that would have significant business impact.”

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Eventually, Xtivity acquired his firm. He joined full-time and began working exclusively on MRO.

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‍Why Spare Parts and MRO Matter More Than You Think

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Jordan quickly realised that spare parts weren’t just a maintenance line item—they were a strategic lever for performance. But unlike direct procurement, which had been heavily optimised over decades, spare parts procurement was fairly immature.

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“In direct procurement, much of the work is about fine-tuning. But in the spare parts and MRO space, organizations often start with fragmented processes, poor visibility, and minimal strategic oversight. That means there’s room to drive big results.”

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And most important, the impact was visible. When spare parts were handled right, assets ran more reliably, downtime dropped, and planners could stop firefighting.

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“If you're somebody that's interested in having a big impact and being able to demonstrably see the benefits of your efforts, it's a very exciting space to work.”

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When Ambition Isn’t the Problem—But the Master Data Management Is

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So why don’t more companies succeed in fixing their spare parts and MRO strategies?

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“When it comes to spare parts and Master Data Management, most companies don’t suffer from a lack of ambition or tools—they suffer from bad data.”

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Jordan’s experience across both direct and indirect supply chains revealed a stark contrast in how data is handled. On the direct side, data maturity is high—driven by customer-facing data exchanges, regulatory compliance, and trading partner requirements. On the MRO side? Standards are inconsistent. Governance is minimal. And many are flying blind.

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“If you think about the information that's trading between a Walmart and for example Kellogg's, I could go back 20 years and still be more mature than what we tend to see now in the MRO world.”

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The result: fragmented catalogs, duplicate items, incorrect units of measure, and missing criticality attributes. Jordan recalls clients unable to sort stocked vs. non-stocked parts, parts described in many different ways, duplicate inventories and lead times measured by anecdote.

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“There’s still lots of room for improvement—how we describe items, how we manage units of measure, how we categorise and track spend... These are things that people struggle with in the spare parts and MRO community.”

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Data Quality Is the Biggest Risk You’re Not Managing

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It’s tempting to think that a better ERP implementation will fix this. But Jordan cautions that ERPs don’t solve master data management problems—they scale them.

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“ERPs are really good at doing things consistently, but that doesn't mean you're doing things consistently right. You can perpetuate poor practices for years.”

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That’s why his first recommendation to clients isn’t a new tool—it’s to fix the data. It’s the critical first step. Because without clean data, no planner can plan, no system can optimise, and problems are masked.

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That’s where Sparrow.CLEAN comes in: helping MRO teams deduplicate catalogs, standardise units and descriptions, and restore confidence in their part master.

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Say Goodbye to the Waiting Game with Better Master Data

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The operational impact of bad MRO data is real: expensive emergency buys, excess inventory, unplanned downtime–and inaccurate lead times for critical parts.

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“Sometimes you're on the spare parts side of things and you have a part that has a four-month lead time... and you get two weeks’ notice to get that part.”

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In one client example, Jordan saw parts with 265-day lead times ordered with days of notice—leading to urgent freight, high cost, and serious service risk. 

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That’s not a failure of procurement—it’s a failure of master data and replenishment planning visibility. This can be solved with Sparrow.PLAN, which includes replenishment data in each part’s master data. It also predicts spare parts demand and supply by combining historical spare parts usage data with real-time expected delivery times from manufacturers and resellers. 

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Spare Parts and MRO Success Starts with Structure

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Before organizations try to forecast, pool, or optimise spare parts, they need to ask: Can we even trust our item master? Do we know what we’re stocking, where it is, and whether it’s still needed?

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“There’s still lots of room for improvement… how we describe items, how we make sure we’ve got the units of measure, how you are buying it versus how you're consuming it.”

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The answer, often, is no. And that’s where the real opportunity of Master Data Management begins.

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Coming Up Next: The Culture Problem Behind Spare Parts

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Fixing spare parts isn’t just about better data or smarter tools—it’s about changing how organizations view MRO altogether. In the next post in the Inside MRO series, we explore why MRO is still seen as a backwater, how that limits business performance, and what it takes to make spare parts matter to the people who make decisions.

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Stay tuned for: Why Spare Parts Inventory Management Doesn’t Get the Love—And Why That’s Hurting Your Business

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