A feature of Asset Management excellence is that it targets specific resources to critical assets ensuring that maintenance interventions are completed in the most appropriate and timely manner and that non-critical assets are dealt with in some other appropriate way. The demand on plant availability and minimisation of mean time to repair is always a key focus of asset management. Having the correct and usable spares available when the plant demands it is something that may have been taken for granted for many years, largely due to one of the well-established strategies in hydropower plants being an built-in redundancy. A failure at Meridian's most important station in 2013 and the lack of a serviceable spare reminded the asset team that improvement opportunities still exist, even in a company that has been awarded a Gold Asset Management Award from the Asset Management Council Australia. A question was asked to the team "What other critical spares should we have? Do we have them available and are they fit for use?" Answer: We don't know what we don't know. But we need to start looking now. We have over 73,000 assets registered in our computer maintenance management system Maximo and 8,673 items in inventory but we didn't have a clear or consistent process in place to identify which spares were critical. Subsequently Meridian embarked on a 4 years critical spares identification programme in 2013 with the aim to review the outcome of the programme at the final year A critical spares policy was developed detailing the attributes of a critical spare, key processes involved in the identification of critical spares, the roles and responsibilities and associated processes. Along with the policy, an approach process has also been developed to identify, evaluate, purchase, store, maintain and manage critical spares. This paper covers the Why, How, What and the Challenges of our 3 year journey to identify all critical spares at all seven of Meridian's hydro power stations.
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