Strategies in spare parts management using a reliability engineering approach

Maintenance in a process industry, such as chemical and oil companies and food processing, needs frequent part replacements to assure continued operations. These parts represent non-repairable items which are best purchased, such as bearings and gaskets. Based on limited information on the time between failures of such systems, one can forecast the need for spare parts for a given planning horizon, which may be from one to several years. In this paper the authors discuss the methodology to calculate the spare part requirements for non-repairable systems and purchasing strategies for these parts. These strategies are based on a stochastic characterization of the time between failures of the system. The inventory level to be maintained will depend upon the need of such parts in consecutive time intervals or inventory cycles to satisfy the maintenance requirements with an acceptable risk level.