My friend who works in maintenance told me this story that he had just successfully resolved. One of his clients had a part failure on a disk drive on Saturday. When the part was ordered by the technician who responded to the call, since it was not deemed a critical part, it was flagged for next business day. As a low volume part, it was shipped from the central warehouse in Toronto, and arrived late Tuesday.

The part is used principally in servers, which are clustered, and if one is down, performance is easily maintained with load sharing. This same part is used in the disk drives. While disk drives might be doubled for performance, running a business-critical application with just one disk was not a risk the client wanted to take over a whole weekend and two business days. Many customers double disk drives for resiliency and failure protection.

Everything worked out fine, with just a bit of stress all around.

I started to think how you handle this situation from a systems point of view.

1. When the part was created in the system as a server part, it made sense for it to be a non-critical spare with low volume, so centralized stocking was appropriate. Check.

2. When engineering used the same part in disk drives to reduce overall parts complexity, it made sense. Check.

3. When the new drives were sent into the market, the parts existed and were being held in inventory. Check.

4. What apparently did not happen was a review of parts to ensure that this critical equipment's parts took on the critical designation of the equipment it was now used in. Oops!

Which led me to wonder: Do Computer Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) have the functionality to manage parts for which there are different levels of criticality depending on the kind of demand?

Of course, it is easy to override the stocking algorithm and force a local stock with one part and a reorder level of 0.

Problem fixed.

And it will be easy to forget to reverse that when those disk drives are upgraded.

How do you handle this in your organization?

Sounds like a great use case set for RPA.

As an experiment, I ran this through Bing chat to see what a rewrite for linkedin would look like.

I recently heard a fascinating story from a friend who works in maintenance. He had to deal with a part failure on a disk drive that took several days to resolve. The part was not considered critical for servers, but it was crucial for disk drives that ran business-critical applications.
This made me think about how we can manage parts that have different levels of criticality depending on the equipment they are used in. How do we ensure that we have the right parts in stock for the right equipment at the right time?
I did some research on methods of identifying and ranking the most critical assets in your operations and optimizing your maintenance and reliability strategies accordingly. They also help you improve asset availability, safety, and uptime.A CMMS can help with managing critical spares, inventory optimization, capital allocation, failure analysis, help you track your parts inventory, monitor your asset performance, and analyze your failure data [list of sources].
What do you think about this topic? How do you handle parts with different levels of criticality in your organization? Let me know in the comments!