Spares Calculator helps a global manufacturer to optimize their spare parts deployments, maximize system availability and minimize their through life costs.

Is it possible to maximize system availability and minimize through life costs? According to a Fortune-500 global manufacturing company it can. A few years ago the company’s 6-sigma team became aware of Spares Calculator and decided to run a trial. The results showed that all of their sites were over-stocking on certain line items and under-stocking on others.

Spares Calculator has given us a scientific way to work out how many spare parts we need. We tested Spares Calculator on a random sample of 20 line items used in our 12 operations spread across Asia. The results were amazingly accurate. We now have an enterprise licence and use Spares Calculator to workout how many spares we need and where to deploy them.

Spares Calculator is now being used to:

  • Calculate shortfalls
  • Redistribute spares
  • Procure additional spares
  • Identify possible resale opportunities
  • Justify capital investments

And the results? With minimal training users quickly identified the optimum levels of stock required by each facility and redeployed where necessary. This greatly reduced the risk on the operation leading to less outages.

In the words of the company’s SVP of Operations:

By using Spares Calculator we have learned to use our existing assets more effectively. Over the past year we have worked hard to reduce the risk on our operations by deploying our spares where they are needed. We have also identified certain shortages and Spares Calculator has helped us to justify an increase in our MRO budget to cover those items. Now we have started to look at how we can dispose of some of our redundant stock to recover some capital. Spares Calculator has been an excellent investment.