Spare parts’ criticality assessment and prioritization for enhancing manufacturing systems’ availability and reliability

Abstract

Manufacturing systems (MSs) have become more and more complex, due to global competition. Optimal spare parts provisioning plays a critical role in sustaining an anticipated operational competitiveness level, via efficient and effective maintenance of machinery. The forecasting of intermittent demand for spare parts is a challenge, as it is not always possible to avoid random unforeseen breakdowns, which reduce availability and increase the unreliability of manufacturing systems. The aforementioned requires a systemic perspective, in order to perform a criticality analysis and prioritization of the spare parts needed to increase a manufacturing system’s availability and reliability. This paper first demonstrates the development of an empirical model (EM), using a case study MS. The EM enables a criticality analysis to be performed, considering the system perspective of spare part management, by taking maintenance-related and logistics-related factors into account. After that, the machineries are categorized into groups, considering the factors related to the maintenance, logistics and criticality levels. The second part presents how to perform spare part prioritization within a selected group, via an analytic hierarchy process (AHP), to minimize ad hoc suboptimal assessments, together with sensitivity analyses. Finally, it presents the spare part prioritization and the subsequent sensitivity analysis results.