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Reliability Centered Spares

How good is your spares management? How often have you identified the need to replace components for yourasset only to find the spares are not available? This situation would normally result in an unnecessary increase ofdowntime.

Initial stock decisions are usually based on the original equipment manufacturers recommendations and theexperience of the plant engineers and maintainer. Unfortunately, this can result in sub optimum or even excessinventory holding of spare parts. RCS helps engineers and inventory management managers to determine the rightstocking level. The objective of RCS is to keep in stock only those parts which are necessary for maintaining plantoperation and to reduce or eliminate unnecessary stock or stock which can be effectively held by the vendor orother third party.

The RCS ProcessThe RCS process was developed by Mark Horton of iSC based on Reliability Centered Maintenance approach. Theprocess takes into account both commercial factors and maintenance requirements. RCS basically determines whatspares must be held to ensure that equipment continues to meet its desired standard performance. The process isinvolves answering the 5 basic questions of RCS which are:

What are the maintenance requirements of the asset? (Ensuring that the maintenancerequirements of the assets are clearly understood)

What happens if no spare part is available? (Identifying the consequences if spares

parts are not available)

Can the spares' requirement be anticipated?

What stock holding of the spare part is needed?

What if the maintenance requirements cannot be met?

RCS ToolkitSupporting the thought process of RCS is the RCS toolkit. Embedded in the toolkit are mathematical algorithminvolving linear programming formulations aimed at assisting the decision making process to determine the mostappropriate stock holding policy for spare parts. Especially those decisions involving high cost, slow moving spareparts

Making Robust DecisionsUtilizing the RCS process and the RCS toolkit not only enables you to work out the right stocking strategy for yourorganization, it also allow you to see immediately the effects of uncertainty (in demand, pattern, lead time, etc)to your decision. You can be confident that the decisions you make with the RCS methodology are robust andauditable

RCS Benefits

Elimination of unnecessary inventoryImproved stock holding confidence and elimination of uncontrolled small stores created bymaintenanceImproved relationship with suppliersReduced exposure to the risk of extended downtime through lack of appropriate spare parts instockImproved communication between operations, maintenance and inventory personnel

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