When is Critical Really Critical?

Turning a Critical Eye to Your Inventory

by Phillip Slater

There is an old saying that goes something like ‘a maintenance engineer never met a spare he didn’t like’. However, perhaps the maintenance engineer should not like his meta-spares quite so much. What’s a meta-spare? I’ll get to that.

In my work helping companies optimize their spare parts inventory management, I am almost always greeted by a new client with the exclamation ‘you can’t do anything about that spare, it is critical’. Critical spares are held in high regard and treated as untouchables. However, whether or not a spare is critical is not the point when it comes to inventory review, because you can still hold too much of a critical item. In my opinion, the comments I hear on critical spares are usually more emotional than scientific. Let me explain.