Without knowing the maturity of your decision making framework and policy settings I can’t give a specific response to a question so here is the generic version.
Working together, you and the maintenance team need to understand the maintenance requirements for the equipment and the spare parts implications of this. For example, what is the plan for preventive maintenance and what is the expected frequency of this maintenance? (Noting that frequency could be time based, hours run based or condition based).
- Then maintenance needs to identify what parts are needed for this work.
- Knowing this you can then (together) decide, based on supply considerations, which items to order as planned and which to hold as stock. For instance, for an annual shut down PM, items with a short lead time may be ordered via a maintenance plan rather than held in stock. Similarly, items with a long lead time for the same PM may need to be stocked.
- You then need to go through the same thinking with insurance spares and ‘just in case’ breakdown spares (which may double up with PM spares).
The main trap here is that maintenance folk can see every part as being ‘critical’ so you need to agree on how these items will be treated and how criticality is defined.