Shelf Life: Building a Spare-Parts and Documentation Strategy for Building Technology

Small failures become business disruptions when the right parts, consumables, and records aren’t where teams expect them. In this episode Alex Morgan interviews Michael Harrington to unpack a disciplined approach to spare‑parts inventory, versioned documentation, and knowledge transfer that property teams can implement without overstocking or vendor dependency. We cover how to decide what to keep on-site, how to version and store operational documents, handoff practices at project close, and the tradeoffs between centralized warehousing and distributed caches. Michael brings real-world examples from commercial portfolios where a $50 part or a spreadsheet saved hours of tenant downtime — and where poor tracking turned a minor fault into a multi-day outage. Listeners will get practical rules of thumb for inventory tiers, documentation ownership, and low-effort audits so building teams can reduce mean time to repair and protect tenant operations.