5 ways to master successful spares management

Maintenance often results in material consumption of some kind. And if no spares are available because you’ve run out of particular part and quick delivery is unavailable, a breakdown can mean major problems.

So, it’s important to manage your spares so that you have what you need available in a timely manner. When something does wear out and cause a machine to stop, you have replacements at your fingertips so that you can minimize downtime.

See our blog on how to minimize downtime

All this centres on effective spares management. Here are five tips to help you achieve it.

1. Have a culture and strategy in place
2. Set clear objectives and KPIs to measure them
3. Carefully assess your spares needs
4. Keep up regular maintenance
5. Manage your spares

Strategy

It’s important to plan in your maintenance and keep spares in stock to meet the need at the right time. You should document your strategy and share it with key staff.

Spares are kept in order to replace worn or damaged parts in operational machinery in the most cost-effective way. Concept of lean manufacturing means that you need your spares to be available in a timely way while keeping inventory as low as possible, so you don’t have loads of cash tied up. Quick response and despatch from you OEM vendor will minimize downtime and keep inventory costs down.

The best strategy is to balance inventory with your maintenance routines so that you can ensure you are holding just the right amount of spares at any one time and you’re not overstretching your cashflow.

Objectives & KPIs

The key objective of your spares management process should be to keep an accurate inventory to help to reduce the stock of spares you’re holding and the cost of replenishing it.

Overarching that is the objective of keeping your lines running and minimising downtime due to maintenance and/or breakdown.

There are a number of things you can measure to check if you are meeting these objectives. Here are some suggested key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Maintenance work orders – instances of planned or routine maintenance versus ad hoc repairs
• Stock control – measure inventory levels for optimum availability versus cost
• Cost/number of parts in stock that are rarely used
• Cost of buying critical parts not in stock
• Delivery performance from suppliers

Having an objective and being able to measure your stock levels and costs against it will help you to effectively manage your stock of spares and your maintenance delivery.

Assessing the need

You should work out how much it costs to carry a stock of spares versus how much downtime as a result of machine failure is going to cost you. Review your processes and assess where, if there was a failure, the highest negative impact on your business would be. These suggested assessment criteria might help you in that task:

• Essential – downtime causes revenue flow to cease – keep spares for critical processes in stock, on site.
• Critical – reduced performance will impact revenue – spares that can be got to site within 2-4 hours.
• Vital – downtime affects production and compliance – spares can be brought to site within 2-4 days.
• Nice to have – no immediate affect on revenue or compliance – look for lowest cost

Using these terms will help you to judge whether it’s worth keeping a stock of spares or simply rely on the delivery turnaround of your spare parts supplier. At Yamato we have a same-day despatch policy on all genuine spares held in stock.

Maintenance

Make sure you look after the spares that you have in stock to ensure they will perform to optimum when they are used. Keep them clean and lubricated if needed. Store them in a dust-free environment as far as possible.

In terms of your machines, adopt a regular predictive maintenance regime. Check to see whether, like Yamato, your equipment OEM offers maintenance packages that can help you to ensure this happens.

Spares management

You will need to check you spares inventory on a regular basis to guard against obsolescence and depreciation. You will also need to balance a depleted stock that might prevent you from dealing with business-critical repairs in a timely manner and overstocking, which will tie up cash and affect your ROI.

Spare parts management is about systematizing and structuring your spares stock to enable efficient inventory management. Getting this right should enable you to improve availability and reduce your capital expenditure.

Without spare parts, there is a risk of downtime, which may lower the quality of goods produced, cause environmentally hazardous emissions and create a hazard to staff. This usually leads to the accumulation of an excessive amount of spare parts, which often leads to large amounts of capital expenditure. It could also be that it is difficult to plan spare parts consumption as it is subject to varying demand.

Therefore, it is important to have a good spare parts inventory system in place. This reduces the production downtime and simplifies equipment maintenance. The goal of spare parts management is to ensure the lowest overall cost possible. The total cost includes inventory, administration and various forms of shortage costs.

Make sure you catalogue your spares and make sure you’re not overstocking with duplicate parts that you’re unlikely to need.

Individual spare parts packages and maintenance contracts are available on request – to find out more call our spare parts team today.