Some plants get caught off guard at year-end when they’ve planned for downtime but haven’t ordered spare parts to match up with it. The budget’s there and the shutdown’s marked on the calendar, yet the two don’t line up, creating a missed opportunity for maintenance during downtime.
It’s an easy fix that requires a little foresight. Order the parts now and, when December comes around, your crew or service professionals can walk in with everything staged and ready to go. What should you order and how far ahead should you plan? Here’s a brief guide, including how we make the entire process easy for you.
Our maintenance guide/checklist is a good place to start building your spare parts list. It goes through every major component in a system, and most of the wear items on it are things you can have sitting on a shelf right now.
Rotary valves are a good one to check early, because manufacturers generally call for those inspections every three months or 2,500 operating hours. If you’re past either mark heading into the shutdown, go ahead and plan on seals.
Intervals and part numbers vary by model, so check the manual for your exact equipment so you order the right part.
Your own records are better than any general checklist. Spare-parts usage, CMMS work orders, and past service tickets all point to what wears out in your plant according to your materials, at your throughput.
Pull data for the last 12 to 18 months and look for repeats. A seal you’ve replaced twice since spring is a better clue than a generic maintenance schedule.
It’s tempting to work down a list component by component, but components don’t fail that way in isolation. A worn rotary valve pulls down conveying efficiency, and a clogged filter makes the blower work harder for the same result.
One facility learned that the hard way with four screeners. AZO’s team rebuilt two of them on site, but there wasn’t enough production downtime left to get to the other two. Those worn bearings kept running, the vibration traveled, and screeners on other lines failed behind them. Each replacement ran somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000, plus the production lost along the way.
A few things that help when you’re laying out the downtime window:
And get sign-off from production on what’s coming offline before the window opens. There’s more on that in our post on maintenance safety.
Having the parts in the building is step one. Next, you need to stage them to get the work done.
One manufacturer we work with started building kits in the maintenance shop ahead of time, grouped by job, so a technician could grab a box and go instead of hunting through the storeroom when the line was down. Paired with moving their rotary sifter bearing replacements from 12 months to nine, they cut downtime by about 1% during production.
A small adjustment, but it compounds with every shutdown after that, accumulating into a large win for the system’s output.
If you’d rather not manage the ordering cycle yourself every year, that’s what AZO’s service contracts are built for. They include discounts on OEM spare parts, which keeps costs down and ensures part compatibility for your system. Maintenance visits are scheduled around your plant’s actual operations rather than a generic calendar, and payment terms can be set up to line up with your procurement cycles.
Every contract comes with a maintenance plan built around how your plant runs and what it handles, so equipment isn’t over-serviced or left waiting. Technicians also flag upgrade and retrofit opportunities while they’re on site, which is often where the next round of improvements comes from.
AZO CARE takes the same idea further, pulling preventive maintenance, inspections, spare parts management, and remote support into one ongoing program. More detail on the contract side lives on our Service Contract Program page.
If you’ve got a December downtime coming and you’re not sure what parts to have on hand, reach out to AZO’s Aftermarket Services team and we’ll help. We can put together a parts list for your system, so your crew walks into the shutdown with everything they need.