7. Spare parts stock management

As we have just seen, a well-calculated stock of spare parts almost always represents significant capital, which must be managed taking into account, as is often the case, two perfectly contradictory constraints:

• on the one hand, to keep inventory levels as low as possible (so as not to unnecessarily tie up capital that would be so much more profitable elsewhere, as the financier will tell you);

• secondly, to ensure a satisfactory level of coverage for delivery requests from the maintenance department (or the production department for spares it is called upon to consume, the latter naturally insisting on the guarantee of trouble-free operation of the production tool).

Stock management therefore involves two different tasks:

• ...