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 replacement of failed units. Spare parts are an important feature of logistics engineering and supply chain management, often comprising dedicated spare parts management systems.

Capital spares 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.

Spare parts are an outgrowth of the industrial development of interchangeable parts and mass production.

In logistics, spare parts can be broadly classified into two groups, repairables and consumables.

Economically, there is a tradeoff between the cost of ordering a replacement part and the cost of repairing a failed part. When the cost of repair becomes a significant percentage of the cost of replacement, it becomes economically favorable to simply order a replacement part. In such cases, the part is said to be "beyond economic repair" (BER), and the percentage associated with this threshold is known as the BER rate. Analysis of economic tradeoffs is formally evaluated using Level of Repair Analysis (LORA).

Repairable parts are parts that are deemed worthy of repair, usually by virtue of economic consideration of their repair cost. Rather than bear the cost of completely replacing a finished product, repairables typically are designed to enable more affordable maintenance by being more modular. This allows components to be more easily removed, repaired, and replaced, enabling cheaper replacement. Spare parts that are needed to support condemnation of repairable parts are known as replenishment spares.

A rotable pool is a pool of repairable spare parts inventory set aside to allow for multiple repairs to be accomplished simultaneously. This can be used to minimize conditions for repairable items.

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