A Life Cycle Cost Framework for the management of spare parts

In any industrial organization, the management of spare parts is very important because of functional and economic reasons. In order to have a good level of availability of the machine it is necessary to have a stock level of spare parts. On the other hand the efficacy and efficiency of maintenance policies depend on the ability to optimize the management of such supplies. Moreover, stock of spare parts represents for a company an elevated voice of cost, since it means to immobilize capital.

The aim of this work is to determine the optimal spare parts volume so to minimize the operating costs and of the lost production costs for unavailability. The work explores the classification criteria of spare parts by means of opportune Criticality Analysis. According to an appropriate “decision tree”, spare parts are divided in a series of classes corresponding to different management policies, as RCM technique does with failure causes. Applying an algorithm of statistics management and by means of a technical-economic simulation methodology, we determined the optimal spare parts volume considering as key parameters the supply time and the level of service.