Spare part
A spare part, spare, service part, repair part, or replacement part, is an interchangeable part that is kept in an inventory and used for the repair or refurbishment of defective equipment/units. Spare parts are an important feature of logistics engineering and supply chain management, often comprising dedicated spare parts management systems.
For other uses, see Spare Parts (disambiguation).
Spare parts are an outgrowth of the industrial development of interchangeable parts and mass production.
In an industrial environment, spare parts are described in several manner to distinguish key features of various spare parts. The following describes spare part types and their typically functionality.
1. Capital parts are spare parts which, although acknowledged to have a long life or a small chance of failure, would cause a long shutdown of equipment because it would take a long time to get a replacement for them. Capital parts are typically repaired or replaced during planned overhauls/scheduled inspections. As description implies, these Capital Parts are typically expensive and are depreciated over time.
Examples of capital parts include pumps and motor sets used in industrial plants, or impeller or a rotor required for a pump or motor. This “spare” requirement would be determined by redundancy of equipment used in the industrial processes.
2. Consumables can be divided into two groups:
3. Inspection spares or outage spares typically refer to those spare parts used in conjunction with Capital Parts during planned overhauls/scheduled inspections and maybe reused but typically are not repairable and are discarded after removal from use if Inspection Spares are damaged. These Inspection Spares are sometimes mis-characterized as Capital spares (vs Capital Parts) and are also confounded with Inspection Consumables, which must be replaced at every inspection/outage. (an example of inspection spares would be bearings and mechanical seals, large bolts and nuts.)
4. Operational spares typically refer to those spare parts that are used during operation of equipment and would not require planned overhauls/scheduled inspections to replace. In an industrial setting, operational spares would be gages, valves (solenoid, MOVs that are in redundancy), transmitters, I/O boards, small AC/DC power supplies, etc.) (for a car, it would windshield wiper)
Legislation[edit]
There is no UK or EU legislation which states that spare parts have to be available for any set period of time,[2] but some trade associations require their members to ensure products are not rendered useless because spare parts are not available.[3] The 'six year rule' in the UK Sale of Goods Act 1979 relates to the time period for enforcing claims that goods were defective when sold, not to whether spare parts are available to repair them, and section 23(3) of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that a consumer cannot require a trader to repair or replace goods if "the repair or replacement is impossible", implying that if spare parts are no longer available the consumer's Right to Repair (or to have a spare part supplied) would be lost.[4]
Repair cycle[edit]
From the perspective of logistics, a model of the life cycle of parts in a supply chain can be developed. This model, called the repair cycle, consists of functioning parts in use by equipment operators, and the entire sequence of suppliers or repair providers that replenish functional part inventories, either by production or repair, when they have failed. Ultimately, this sequence ends with the manufacturer. This type of model allows demands on a supply system to ultimately be traced to their operational reliability, allowing for analysis of the dynamics of the supply system, in particular, spare parts.
Commercial[edit]
Industrialization has seen the widespread growth of commercial manufacturing enterprises, such as the automotive industry, and later, the computer industry. The resulting complex systems have evolved modular support infrastructures, with the reliance on auto parts in the automotive industry, and replaceable computer modules known as field-replaceable units (FRUs).