The best engineering maintenance store is an empty one...

An empty maintenance store? No store at all? Madness, surely!

Well ok, so I’m being provocative. But, let’s think for a moment - why do we hold spares for our equipment? In case they break down of course. We congratulate ourselves for having the foresight to hold all the possible spare parts so that we can mend the equipment when it breaks down. We tell our operational management that we have their best interests at heart and will quickly be able to fix their broken machine. We invest a lot of time, space and capital in determining the spares, purchasing and storing them.

We get a self-satisfied warm glow but this masks how to really improve our asset care regimes. Holding the spare in stock doesn’t actually stop the breakdown occurring, it just enables us to fix it quicker. And, sometimes even that is not realisable when we discover that the spare we’ve been holding has disappeared, gone rusty or is no longer the current version.

Rather than spend professional engineering time poring through equipment manuals and drawings, and in debating spare parts lists with equipment manufacturers (who rub their hands with glee at the prospect of unloading pallet loads of spare parts onto you) you should be asking why their equipment is so badly designed and unreliable. Better to spend the time designing out its unreliability. Think about your personal purchases. Are you filled with confidence about that prospective new car if the salesman tells you that you should also buy a complete set of spares to hold in your garage?

Yes, of course parts wear out and fail. But rarely is this truly unpredictable or random. This is why, or at least should be why, planned maintenance regimes are set up. If indicators of failure (time, usage, condition) can be determined and replacements pre-planned then the parts can be purchased when needed. They will often not need to be routinely stocked.

The best maintenance intervention on a piece of equipment is the predictable, planned one.