Almost all production and service industries have high demands when it comes to uptime of their assets. An asset being down could have disastrous consequences such as lost revenues due to production stagnation or even severe safety issues (e.g. at nuclear power plants).

To minimise the downtime of an asset, maintenance must be performed. In order to perform this maintenance it is essential to have the right spare parts on stock.

However, especially for capital intensive assets the costs of being able to maintain these assets regularly and properly could get high.

Think of inventory holding costs associated with the working capital of spare parts but also operational costs of transport, warehousing, and transactional costs at the purchase department.

Today, more and more companies recognise this trade-off of uptime and costs but struggle with the strategy to imbed it in the organisation.

The root causes are divers but the main drivers we see are a lack of spare parts expertise and the inventory management department not being recognised as such, but also not having a proper IT system in place to cope with the characteristics of spare parts and asset management in general.

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