Vicky B. Sardar

Dr. (Mrs.) Neela R Rajhans

Abstract

Spare parts Management contributes in achieving the desired product availability at an optimum cost. Presently, the industries are going for mass production and complex technology. The downtime for such plant and machinery is expensive. It has been observed in many cases that the non availability of spare parts, as and when required, contributes to more than 40% of the total down time. Also, the cost of spare parts is more than 50% of the total maintenance cost in an industry. While dealing with intermittent demand there is an element of uncertainty as to when a part is required and also the quantity of its requirement. This is due to the fact that the failure of a component cannot be predicted accurately. Spare parts inventories cannot be managed by standard inventory control methods as there is a lot of difference between spare parts inventory and regular inventory. Optimum spare parts have to be stocked at appropriate points in the supply chain to guarantee a high service level. It is essential to concentrate on various characteristics of spare parts inventory such as the frequency of issues, the annual consumption value, the criticality, the lead time and the unit price. Also, if altogether a different approach for all items considering all the characteristics is exercised, it may really be effective. Use of classical statistical methods can ease the work of forecasting spare parts demand. The main objective of this paper is to observe the distribution pattern followed by spare parts so as to reduce the inventory costs.

Keywords- Characteristics;Spare Parts; distribution