A new white paper from RS and The DCA - Data Centre Alliance - Trade Association to the data centre sector shows data centre operators know exactly what they need from an MRO supplier when a fault strikes – but procurement systems are still built for a different set of priorities.
Ask a data centre operations manager what matters most when a critical component fails, and the answer is never price. It’s speed and availability, whether the right part can be in their hands before the Service Level Agreement (SLA) clock runs out and the call reaches the board.
That is the clear message from a new white paper produced by RS in partnership with The DCA, which features original research and expert commentary, on how data centre professionals manage Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO). Speed of delivery is rated "very important" by 82 per cent of respondents when evaluating MRO suppliers, and responsiveness and support by 80 per cent. Price comes last of the five criteria tested, rated "very important" by just 51 per cent.
Yet procurement frameworks governing most organisations often focus on lowest-cost tendering. MRO sits within indirect procurement, characterised by high-volume, low-value tail spend that stays largely invisible to senior leadership until something goes wrong. The whitepaper finds that approval processes and supplier criteria designed to manage a consumables budget are the wrong tools for a supply chain that must respond to a fault event within hours.
Every unnecessary step in that process adds time to the outage clock, whether that’s an approval queue, an unfamiliar portal login, or a search for a supplier contact number. Phil Broughton, Special Projects Manager at the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS), maps out what a single unplanned outage sets in motion: "You’ve got SLA penalties and customer compensation, lost revenue and future contracts, and not forgetting reputational damage. Then the cascading effect - one failure impacts the rest of the business, everybody suffers from the same thing."
“Customers expect uptime and access to what is in the cloud all the time.” Richard Graham, Industry Sector Manager, RS UK & Ireland
Richard Graham, Industry Sector Manager at RS UK & Ireland, agrees the reputational stakes are unusually high in this sector. "Customers expect uptime and access to what is in the cloud all the time," he says. "We have all seen news stories over the past few years with website or social media platforms being down. There is a cost implication, but clearly a reputational element too."
Broughton’s proposed antidote is to build "what if" scenarios into procurement before a crisis happens, with pre-qualified suppliers, tested response times, and category managers who scan the market continuously rather than reacting to the next emergency call.
The discoverability challenge
Even where the right supplier relationship exists, the white paper uncovers a second, related problem: finding the right part fast enough. Almost three quarters of respondents (74%) say part identification contributes to delays in restoring operations, and 17 per cent say it frequently extends repair time.
This isn’t a shortage of choice as the average data centre uses 27 MRO suppliers. It’s that search tools are built around procurement workflows and internal reference numbers, rather than the equipment types and failure modes an engineer is dealing with mid-fault. Add incomplete or outdated equipment lists, often held in one engineer’s head rather than being accessible on a shared system, and the result is friction at precisely the moment it matters most.
The fix, Broughton argues, is to move from a broad catalogue to a customer-specific one: an approved product list built around an operator’s own asset register, mapped to failure probability and lead-time risk. "You need the investment in the digital software and systems, and also the people to operate it," he says. "It’s not just the system. It’s the data function that understands what is needed, why it is needed, how to present it."
Graham sums up the standard the sector should be working towards: "Product availability and speed really are paramount in this area." The procurement frameworks governing MRO buying, the white paper concludes, need to catch up with what operators already know they need.
To read the full white paper download A spotlight on Data Centres: How MRO is central to their future.