Your maintenance and reliability team will know better than anyone the impact a spare-parts shortage has on the business. No spare often equals no production, so there is sometimes an attitude of “the more the merrier.”
But what about working capital? Companies often have far too much money tied up in their spare parts inventory. This expenditure may not provide any real value to the company if many of the parts purchased become obsolete before they can be used. That is not to say they don’t need the spares, but maybe they don’t need as many as they stock.