Many spare parts problems originate long before they reach the storeroom, often at moments when teams feel the most pressure. A new production line needs to go live. A factory ramp-up is behind schedule. Lead times are long, and no one wants to be responsible for downtime on day one.
In those moments, spare parts decisions are made quickly and with the best intentions. Buy the recommended package. Create the material later. Clean it up once things stabilize.
What is easy to miss is that these early decisions rarely get revisited. Over time, they define the baseline structure of the MRO setup.
Building or commissioning a production line is an intense phase. The focus is on getting machines running, fine-tuning processes, and stabilizing quality. Spare parts are not the priority.
This moment can compare to building a house. When you are trying to make it livable, you are not thinking about insurance. You are thinking about whether the lights turn on and the doors close.
Martin Weber
SPARETECH CEO
Spare parts usually come later. And when they do, teams often face long lead times and uncertainty. The safest looking option is to buy the full spare parts package recommended by the OEM or line builder.
At the time, this feels responsible. Downtime is expensive. Questioning the list feels risky. But what arrives with those packages is rarely neutral.
OEM spare parts packages are typically oversized by design. Spare parts are an after sales business, and risk is shifted away from the OEM and onto the manufacturer.
The larger risk lies in skipping structured validation upfront.
What tends to happen after the package arrives is predictable:
Many parts are never used
Capital sits idle for years
Parts come with new or unfamiliar part numbers
Teams do not always know what the parts are actually for
Industry data confirms this pattern. On average, 22% of MRO inventory remains unused for more than five years. That means one in five spare parts bought today is unlikely to ever support production.
Once these parts are booked into the system, they rarely disappear. They become part of the baseline inventory, even if the original assumptions behind the purchase no longer apply.
One of the least visible consequences of early spare parts decisions is duplication.
Parts from OEM packages often enter the system under new identities. Different naming conventions. Different material numbers. In some cases, different units of measure.
Later, when the same component is needed again, teams search the ERP, do not find a clear match, and create a new material. The duplicate problem grows quietly.
Weber has seen this cycle repeat itself across careers and companies. The pressure to get up and running leads to decisions that seem small at the time but compound into major complexity later.
This is one reason why spare parts inventories grow even when usage does not. The challenge lies in structural fragmentation rather than absolute volume.
When front-end decisions create messy data, teams rarely stop working. They adapt.
Weber has been outspoken about the number of workarounds still used in spare parts processes. Excel intake sheets before the ERP. Lightweight forms with minimal governance. In some cases, handwritten notes passed from technician to storeroom.
In most cases, these behaviors result from unclear systems rather than individual error.
Industry research shows that around 66% of manufacturers still manage MRO without dedicated systems beyond the ERP. As a result, spare parts creation and maintenance rely heavily on manual judgment and local rules.
Workarounds often become embedded in daily operations. Every workaround allows poor data to enter the system faster. And once it is there, it spreads.
As organizations grow, the cost of weak front-end governance increases sharply.
Only about 8% of manufacturers describe their spare parts management as fully standardized. Most operate in a partially standardized state, where some sites follow shared rules and others do not.
Without strong intake discipline, every new plant, line, or project adds another layer of inconsistency. The same spare part exists under multiple identities. Visibility declines. Trust in the data erodes.
At that point, excess inventory and slow sourcing are no longer isolated issues. They are symptoms of a system that never stabilized at the beginning.
Many organizations try to fix spare parts issues downstream. Clean up the storeroom. Reduce inventory targets. Negotiate harder with suppliers.
These efforts can deliver short-term relief, but they rarely address the root cause.
The root cause is often structural. Decisions made at intake shape everything that follows. Once poor data, oversized packages, and duplicated materials are in place, every downstream process inherits that complexity.
Industry data shows that companies with more structured and standardized MRO practices achieve tangible results. Inventory levels decline. Procurement spend drops. Time spent on MRO activities decreases. In many cases, organizations report margin improvements of around 2%.
These outcomes are typically associated with structured and standardized intake processes.
The common thread across Weber’s observations is that manufacturers frequently make rational short-term decisions in environments that lack long-term governance structures.
The focus should be on redesigning front-end decision processes rather than simply reducing volume.
That includes:
When these elements are in place, spare parts stop behaving like insurance policies and start behaving like managed assets.
Manufacturers looking to strengthen their MRO strategy should look upstream before looking downstream.
A few diagnostic questions help surface the real issues:
The pattern typically originates in front-end governance rather than in storeroom operations.
If spare parts complexity continues to increase despite cleanup efforts, the issue is unlikely to be execution. It is intake. Fixing the front end quietly eliminates dozens of downstream problems that otherwise persist for years.