Critical spares are the replacement parts within your critical equipment. If those parts fail, your business will be impacted by the equipment downtime, this may affect, reduce or stop productivity, or harm a person, or an environment.
So why hold these spares at a capital expense, when you have a supply chain to manage your maintenance requirements where these failures should be highlighted and rectified before failure?
There are several reasons:
- It doesn’t form part of the maintenance contract.
- Business does not allow shutdown of plant/equipment for rectification. Business will be running a known risk.
- Failure not reported during maintenance visit(pump always been noisy since we started etc.)
- Budget restrictions.
- Unforeseen failure.
It’s not about holding the physical spare on the site where the equipment/plant is installed, but the acceptable time of the downtime on the business. A good supply chain is an essential part of this risk management. It is no good to have a good maintenance provider, when the part available is on a 4 day delivery from Italy as an example.
Ask yourself a couple of questions:
- Do I know what my critical equipment is?
- Will my business risk model accept this failure?
We’re happy to assist in reviewing what you have, and each requirement, based on your specific asset database. We are a specialist technical asset management consultancy, providing independent technical and digital solutions across the built environment. Our ELIAS technology provides clients across the globe with holistic and dynamic asset management and compliance solutions.
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