MRO procurement: 7 best practices for efficiency

Your company’s ability to meet customer demand starts with smooth internal operations. If machinery breaks, you need supplies on hand to fix it so production and profits are not impacted. Likewise, your teams need day-to-day safety equipment to ensure compliance and a safe work environment. These supplies are a core part of operational efficiency, but to get them, you need a streamlined MRO procurement process. 

In MRO procurement, your buyers focus on securing the goods and services they need to keep production running smoothly. Yet, as in all kinds of procurement, buyers face challenges from cost control to supply chain disruptions. The best way to mitigate these hurdles is to know your operations inside and out and then implement MRO procurement best practices. 

What is MRO procurement? 

Maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) procurement, or MRO purchasing, describes the procurement process that organizations use to acquire goods or services for manufacturing equipment upkeep. For example, if machinery breaks, the supplies to repair it will be part of your MRO spend.

MRO expenditures live under the indirect procurement umbrella—organizations need them to keep efficient operations and on-time production, but they aren’t raw materials. 

Examples of MRO products

Any item or service your machinery needs to run efficiently falls into the MRO procurement category. The following list breaks down common MRO items:

• Spare parts, including bearings or motors
• Safety equipment, such as fire extinguishers
• Personal protective equipment, like helmets or goggles
• Workplace cleaning supplies or services
• Tools like welding rods or pliers
• Facility maintenance services
• Repair services
• Lubricants
• Machinery cleaning products

By listing all your MRO products and their prices, you’ll get a solid grasp on your total costs. 

MRO purchasing and indirect spend

The indirect spend category houses everything your organization needs to support its workflow and employees, including MRO products. Your MRO spend is part of your overall indirect procurement budget. These items help employees do their jobs but are not part of the final product.

Challenges of MRO procurement

One of the first steps in devising your MRO strategy is knowing which challenges you’ll face. While your organization’s hurdles will look different depending on its size and industry, you should still be aware of MRO procurement’s most common challenges:

• Supply chain disruptions: You’ll likely need a variety of supplies from multiple vendors. With so many suppliers on deck, though, an organization becomes more prone to supply chain interruptions that can halt internal operations.
• Inventory management: You’ll want to avoid overstocking, but you won’t want to find yourself without crucial repair supplies if something breaks. As a result, MRO buyers must carefully balance inventory levels when ordering from vendors.
• Operational downtime: If the equipment or supplies you need aren’t available, your entire production line could stop, resulting in expensive delays and last-minute supplier orders.
• Vendor management: Tracking and auditing supplier performance when managing several vendors is far more difficult than working with a handful of suppliers.
• Supplier relationships: Because your team is juggling several vendors, it’s less likely that you’ll forge strong partnerships, which makes it harder to take advantage of bulk discounts or negotiate for more favorable contracts.
• Cost-effective orders: Without in-depth purchasing visibility across your entire MRO procurement process, it’s harder to uncover ways to make cost-effective purchases, such as opportunities to consolidate orders.
• Poor spend visibility: It’s more likely that your organization will overspend on MRO products and have inefficient cost management when it lacks visibility into current spending, operational needs, and purchasing frequency.
• Demand forecasting: Your organization’s needs respond to consumer demand. Because of this, you’ll want to order accordingly—but without reliable demand forecasting, it’s nearly impossible to plan ahead and accurately order goods and services.

MRO purchasing is a delicate balance. Your team needs supplies on hand for emergencies and routine fixes, but it also needs to avoid overspending to keep costs low. High MRO procurement costs means less working capital on hand, and less capital makes an organization financially vulnerable to sudden consumer or supply chain shifts. 

The good news is that there are tried-and-true strategies to mitigate these challenges and build resilience.

Seven best practices for reducing costs in MRO procurement

Follow these best practices to cut back MRO procurement costs, streamline operations, and reduce inefficiencies:

1. Prioritize MRO inventory management

Start strategizing your inventory with ABC inventory analysis. This approach includes categorizing inventory based on its value to the organization. For example, A-level items are of high importance to the company—without them, you might face profit loss or bottlenecks. B-level items are moderately important, and C-level items require little monitoring.

As an additional technique, just-in-time (JIT) ordering boosts cost reduction and efficiency by only ordering supplies when you anticipate needing them. In short, you’re optimizing stock levels to save money. JIT also allows you to better respond to sudden changes in demand because you can quickly pivot and purchase different items. However, to work successfully, this strategy requires in-depth insight into your purchasing trends and usage needs.  

2. Optimize your MRO supply chain

An optimized MRO supply chain means your network uses the fewest number of stops and vendors possible, so goods move efficiently from point A to point B. Yet, due to the nature of indirect spend, procurement teams may not be able to avoid working with a range of suppliers. This disparity makes supply chain management more challenging and increases procurement risk.

To successfully optimize your supply network, you’ll first need insight into everything that’s happening across your procurement process. With this big-picture view, you’ll be able to spot opportunities to consolidate orders, efficiently source the right suppliers, or optimize order timing. 

3. Centralize your procurement process

A central procurement process puts all your procurement operations under one roof. It’s the hub that connects and organizes purchasing data from your existing systems. When all this information lives in one place, nothing will slip under your radar and cause bottlenecks downstream. Instead, you’ll get a bird’s-eye view of your procurement process, alongside real-time data analytics, to support decision-making. 

Centralized procurement also helps you maintain your MRO strategy by aggregating your current purchasing data. You can use this data to name key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you which MRO purchasing approaches work well and which need more attention.

4. Use procurement software

Procure-to-pay software can transform your MRO procurement process by improving spend visibility and automating tasks. By implementing the right tools, routine steps like approving purchase requisitions or reconciling invoices and contracts happen instantly.

Today’s most advanced software leverages AI and machine learning. This evolving technology helps procurement teams boost efficiency, rapidly analyze data sets, and run more effective operations.

As a result of using a procurement management solution, your team saves time and money that they can reinvest in growing other areas of the business.

5. Establish a preventive maintenance program

When you prevent issues from arising instead of simply responding to them when they appear, you reduce the odds of costly setbacks. 

To start your preventative maintenance strategy, audit your regular maintenance areas and workflow and look for places where breaks or repairs frequently halt production. Then, compare these areas to your current maintenance schedule to identify gaps. 

Based on your findings, you can create a new schedule for machinery upkeep to prevent broken machinery or operational delays. 

6. Invest in training

To ensure the success of your MRO procurement strategies and best practices, clue your procurement teams and buyers into changes and KPIs you’ve identified. You can also offer in-person or asynchronous support as they learn new tools, techniques, or processes. House all this information in a central database full of instructional videos and documentation. 

When buyers know your company’s purchasing rules, policies, and procedures, it reduces the risk of maverick spending.  

7. Diversify your supplier base

Vendor diversification is an integral supplier management technique and a top priority for organizations in 2025. It refers to building a robust supplier base with primary, secondary, or even tertiary vendors. The primary is your go-to vendor that fulfills orders when everything runs as expected. However, if your primary hits a snag that disrupts their supply chain and can’t make your delivery, you can turn to your second- or third-level suppliers. 

A diverse supplier base reduces interruptions to your operations and helps you build resilience to global supply chain shifts and changes in consumer demand. To create and maintain supplier diversity, adopt software with functionality that focuses specifically on efficient vendor management, as well as global supply chain monitoring. Real-time insight into your marketplace increases the chances of spotting a possible problem area before it hits your network.

Streamline MRO procurement and control your costs

MRO procurement is a central part of your organization’s operations. By implementing the best practices we’ve covered here and leveraging comprehensive software solutions, you can side-step expensive operational delays and control costs. But if you’re ready to regain control over your MRO procurement spend, look no further than HAQM Business. 

As a flexible, intuitive procurement solution for companies of all sizes and sectors, we offer customizable integrations so our software works for your unique team and workflow. This way, you can uncover cost-saving opportunities, boost your operational efficiency, and mitigate risk in a way that works for your team. 

Ready to trim costs and build a more efficient network? HAQM Business is the ideal solution. Discover how we can help you streamline MRO procurement and gain control over your indirect spend today.