Nobody wants to be responsible for not having a critical spare part when it is needed.
Nobody wants to be responsible for not having a critical spare part when it is needed.
There are many issues that have the potential to keep spare parts managers awake at night but without doubt, critical spare parts management must be number 1.
It is a topic that is raised with me regularly in both one-on-one discussions and open forums.
It is a topic that crosses the divide between the storeroom, purchasing, planning, and maintenance.
Nobody wants to be responsible for not having a critical spare part when it is needed.
Yet, very few companies spend the time to develop the expertise required for effective critical spare parts management.
They wouldn’t do that with safety.
Imagine if a company took the same approach to safety as they seem to take with critical spare parts.
There would, of course, be great concern. Everyone would agree on how important it is.
There may or may not be a policy.
If there is a policy it might only say something like, ‘Safety is important’. There would be little follow up.
There might be some rules that ‘sound right’ but little or no checking if those rules are really appropriate.
And almost certainly no enforcement – unless there was an audit or important visitor.
By and large, it would be an issue that is left to the individual to interpret.
Right up until the time there is an incident.
Then it would be the most important issue in the world.
There would be great attention paid. Reviews. Reports. Committee meetings. Blame.
Then it would all blow over and it would once again be a 3rd order issue – until next time.
To me this description reads like the way safety was treated in many industrial environments up until the mid-late 1980’s.
Unfortunately, this is almost exactly how many companies treat critical spare parts management today.
Here are three major mistakes that most companies make with managing critical spare parts:
- They fail to recognize that a critical machine part is not necessarily a critical spare part. Falling for this trap will mean stocking almost everything. And if everything is critical, then nothing is critical.
- They don’t connect the dots between the failure mode and the maintenance response. This means they don’t get a good understanding of the planning time horizon. For example, while some parts fail unexpectedly and catastrophically, and there is little that can be done to predict this, for some, condition monitoring or other maintenance activity will guide the need and timeframe for repair or replacement.
- Similarly, they don’t really understand the time horizon for supply. That is, how quickly they can get the part. Why is this important? Well, if the supply time is shorter than the planning time then you can order as required.
The key to managing critical spare part is to recognize and understand these factors. Get just one of them wrong and your critical spare parts management will be ineffective. And that will cost you money either in excess inventory or excess downtime – maybe even both.
The effective management of spare parts that are defined as critical is the development and application of a policy that addresses these issues. This must provide specific process steps and guidelines and a risk management decision framework.
Anything less than this is gambling with your critical spare parts management.
It is precisely because the issues are many and the nuances subtle that here at SparePartsKnowHow.com we have developed as a platform to access a wide range of resources relating to spare parts inventory management and optimization.
Posted by: Phillip Slater