"Why Didn't We Do This Sooner?"

"Why didn't we do this sooner?"

When maintenance teams spend hours searching for inventory, managing stockrooms, and making supplier runs, that’s time pulled away from operations that keep the campus at its best.

August 18, 2026
By the Blue Print Editorial Team

Your team wasn't hired to manage inventory

Operational challenges within education often revolve around deferred maintenance, staffing shortages, aging infrastructure, and tightening budgets. Translation: Inventory lives behind the scenes.

But inventory touches nearly every corner of facilities – maintenance shops, custodial closets, central storerooms, warehouses. Keeping the right products on hand, at the right time, in the right place takes real labor, time, and budget.

Most inventory management evolves naturally. A technician starts keeping extra supplies on hand. A department develops its own purchasing habits. A storeroom expands for things that might be needed. None of it is unreasonable on its own, but added up all together? You end up spending more energy managing inventory than maintaining the buildings inventory is supposed to support.

The real cost isn't the inventory

Most institutions know what they spend on MRO products. Far fewer know what it costs to support them.

Think about the daily realities your team faces. A technician checks multiple locations to find a part. Someone makes an unplanned trip to a local supplier because a critical item isn’t where it should be. Your team is reconciling purchasing card transactions, counting inventory, receiving deliveries, and moving products across campus so they are available when and where they are needed.

While necessary, these activities are not the work your team exists for. They are the tasks that keep supplies available, organized, and accessible, a structure that supports the inventory system itself. When facilities leaders begin evaluating inventory through this lens, the conversations shift from product costs to operational costs.

Where does your team spend their time?

Facilities departments are expected to maintain safe, functional, and attractive universities for students, faculty, staff, and visitors. At the same time, teams often face staffing constraints, budget pressures, and expanding campus footprints.

In this environment, every hour matters.

When skilled maintenance professionals spend time sourcing parts, tracking deliveries, and managing excess inventory, those hours are unavailable for preventative maintenance, capital improvement projects, or addressing work orders across campus.

The question many institutions are beginning to ask is simple: How much of our team’s time is wasted on tasks not associated with the actual repair?

Building a more efficient campus supply chain

How do you make sure inventory supports the work instead of becoming its own workload?

This is Fastenal’s wheelhouse. Our onsite inventory management solutions (like vending, RFID, bin stocking, and point-of-use replenishment) are built to take the burden off your team. Instead of a technician searching for parts, they’re already at the point of use. Instead of guessing what’s on the shelf, the team has inventory visibility across campus. The result is fewer interruptions, less time spent managing inventory, and more time focused on maintaining facilities and supporting the people who rely on them.

The University of South Carolina experienced this shift firsthand.

As Leroy Sims, Assistant Director of Facilities Custodial Services, explained: “Before Fastenal, getting supplies was quite the chore.” And as Daniel Rabon, Director of Facilities Business Intelligence, puts it: “Having Fastenal on our campus, we now have machines strategically across campus, cutting out windshield time, standardizing our products across all of our campus.”

For higher education, that’s the real opportunity. The greatest impact isn’t simply reducing product costs; it’s allowing maintenance teams to focus on their core responsibilities across campus, not just the inventory.

The bottom line

Facilities teams are critical for supporting student research, learning, and success. When inventory eats into labor, space, and attention, it pulls resources away from the work your campus depends on. Looking at inventory through the lens of time, productivity, and visibility reveals ways to operate more efficiently while helping your team focus on what matters most.

That’s what the University of Houston took away from their inventory management strategy. Rufus Kemp said it best: “Not only did it save us money, but it provides a new level of safety. And yeah, the cost savings is tremendous. I mean, it’s tremendous. It was one of those decisions that was like, ‘Why didn’t we do it five years ago?’”