About Spares Analysis

Spares Analysis is a tool that helps you maintain the optimal number of spare parts. Spares Analysis uses delivery time and cost, downtime, lost production costs, and failure and repair data to calculate how many spare parts should be kept on hand at any given time.

GE Digital APM Reliability Analytics offers various tools that help you analyze the reliability of your equipment and locations so that you can make decisions about when to repair and replace those pieces of equipment and locations. For example, a Reliability Distribution Analysis lets you analyze historical failure data to help predict future failures. Based on those predictions, you can make plans for replacing equipment and making repairs to prevent future failures. As part of making plans to replace equipment in the future, you will want to make sure that you have an adequate number of spare parts available. Having spare parts on hand will help reduce the amount of downtime associated with unplanned failures.

The key to a successful spares program is maintaining a balance between:

Optimizing the spares level so that you have enough spare parts to handle unplanned failures.
Not having a surplus of parts that are not actually needed.

You can modify the input data for a Spares Analysis to evaluate the potential savings or losses associated with changing the spares level. For example, if you currently keep three spare seals for a pump, you could use a Spares Analysis to determine whether it would benefit your company financially to store either more or fewer spare seals instead.