Spare parts visibility in chemical/industrial plants — anyone tying it to failure history instead of just stock levels?
I'm a reliability/maintenance engineer at a chemical plant, and I've seen the same pattern described in a recent thread here — one site scrambling to reorder a part while another site has it sitting unused. What I haven't seen discussed as much is the layer underneath that: most plants set reorder points based on static rules (min/max, safety stock) rather than actual failure and work-order history.
In our world specifically, a lot of "excess" inventory isn't really excess — it's a critical spare for a piece of equipment that fails rarely but catastrophically when it does. Treating that the same as a slow-moving commodity part (just by looking at "hasn't moved in 6 months") leads to the wrong call either way — either you strip out something you genuinely need on hand, or you keep hoarding things that don't matter.
Curious if anyone here in process/chemical/industrial manufacturing specifically has tied spare parts stocking decisions to actual failure frequency and criticality, rather than just visibility/location tracking. Is that happening anywhere in practice, or is it still mostly manual judgment calls by whoever's been at the plant the longest?