how i help

Protect uptime. Control risk. Invest working capital deliberately.

Downtime and asset reliability are the not so silent killers of manufacturing performance. Engineering teams are called to a breakdown, identify the failed component, only to reach the storeroom and discover the part isn’t available. What follows is lost production, expediting, frustration, and pressure to overstock “just in case” next time.Spare parts investment needs to be treated deliberately. It is effectively an insurance policy, and every business must decide what premiums it is willing to pay in exchange for uptime and risk protection. Spare parts management is a critical subset of effective inventory management, particularly in asset intensive environments.

Why Spare Parts Management Breaks Down

Spare parts typically fall into two broad profiles:

Regularly used wear parts
Bearings, seals, o-rings, lubricants, printheads

Irregularly used critical parts
Motors, gearboxes, shafts, drives

Initial stocking levels are often suggested by OEMs at installation. After that, they are rarely revisited. Over time, assets change, production profiles shift, lead times move, and risk accumulates quietly in the background.

Setting spare parts levels based on historical usage alone increases exposure. Critical failures are, by definition, infrequent. A lack of demand history does not mean a lack of risk.

Without clear criticality assessment and categorisation, spare parts inventories are inevitably questioned by finance, labelled as excess or obsolete, and gradually eroded until the next failure exposes the gap.

How Spare Parts Decisions Should Be Made

Effective spare parts management balances competing pressures. Stocking decisions should be based on:

• Asset criticality and consequence of failure
• Asset profile, including quantity and redundancy
• Supplier and repair lead times
• Usage patterns and failure modes
• Stocking strategy, including hub-and-spoke models

At their core, spare parts decisions are trade offs:

• Holding cost versus downtime risk
• Insurance mindset versus pure optimisation

Ignoring these trade-offs does not eliminate risk. It simply hides it.

How I Help

Spare parts management is frequently neglected. Many businesses have a storeroom full of unresolved decisions, out of sight and out of mind — yet these issues represent latent risk waiting for the wrong moment.

I focus on bringing structure, visibility, and governance to this space, including:

• Spare parts profiling and usage analysis
• Criticality assessment and stocking recommendations
• Labelling, identification, and storage standards
• Cycle counting and consumption processes
• Management of repairable and rotable spares
• Cross-site visibility to understand true spare parts investment

A critical element of this work is building clear accountability between technical project teams, maintenance, operations, and finance. Without aligned ownership, spare parts decisions drift and risk quietly re-enters the system.

The outcome is increased production uptime, stronger asset reliability, and more deliberate operational performance.

Where appropriate, I work alongside trusted partners specialising in preventative and predictive maintenance, asset condition monitoring, and total productive maintenance to ensure improvements are sustained.

Case Experience

For a recent example of this work in practice, see the case study of a national food processor.