Every mill relies on spare parts that are essential to keep production running. When those parts are not available or fit for service, the impact on operations can be immediate and costly. The challenge is identifying which spares are truly critical in a way that is objective, transparent, and consistent.
In practice, spare parts criticality provides that framework. By evaluating both operational impact and supply risk, mills gain a shared, data-informed basis for decision-making. This moves the discussion away from subjective opinions and toward an agreed view of a part’s importance to reliability and production.
Understanding Parts Criticality
Parts criticality is the process of distinguishing between parts that are important and those that are essential to maintaining operations. Each spare part is evaluated across two dimensions: the potential impact on production if the part fails, and the risk of not being able to source and install a replacement in time.
Within Remsoft MRO (formerly Xtivity), this assessment is built into the system, creating a common standard across maintenance, stores, and procurement. Instead of relying on individual judgment after a failure has occurred, teams have a consistent framework to guide stocking, inspection, and purchasing decisions before problems arise.
High-criticality parts are often tied to throughput, safety, or environmental compliance and typically carry long lead times or obsolescence risks. Lower-tier items, such as common consumables, rarely justify the cost of holding significant stock.
By using a structured scoring model, criticality brings clarity and accountability to decision-making:
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Maintenance can prioritize inspections, kitting, and pre-outage checks more effectively.
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Procurement gains clear direction on stocking policies, dual sourcing, and supplier Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
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Operations leaders see where vulnerabilities exist on key assets and production lines.
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Logistics and stores teams know when to prioritize expediting, and when standard processes are sufficient.
Challenges in Criticality Programs
In many mills, “critical” becomes a static label applied once and rarely revisited. Without a consistent method, designations are often shaped by personal experience — a costly outage elevates one part to “critical,” while another manager may view the same item as overstock. This subjectivity creates debate but does little to reduce downtime.
Another common issue is classification drift, where too many items are tagged as critical. When everything is labeled essential, focus is lost, carrying costs increase, and truly high-risk parts may still go unprotected.
A reliable program requires structure and governance. Effective practices include:
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Replacing binary labels with tiered categories that capture different levels of risk.
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Building the scoring model with input from maintenance, procurement, and operations to ensure trust and adoption.
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Establishing regular review cycles, with additional checks triggered by events such as supplier changes, extended lead times, or new obsolescence notices.
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Governing changes so that upgrades to higher tiers are documented and justified, preventing “everything is critical” creep.
By combining tiered scoring with review discipline, criticality programs stay relevant as conditions evolve, ensuring that attention remains on the parts that matter most.
Improving Reliability in Mill Operations
This post is part of our MRO blog series, exploring how mills can reduce downtime and improve reliability through better data and decision-making:
- Parts Criticality for Mills: A Guide to Improving MRO Reliability
- Right Sizing MRO Inventory for Mills: How to Cut Dead Stock and Improve Reliability
- Why Master Data Management Matters for Forestry Mills
Together, these insights provide a roadmap for mills to align teams, optimize inventory, and make every stocking decision count.
Turning Scores into Action
A criticality score on its own does not prevent downtime. The value comes when the results are applied consistently across planning, sourcing, and maintenance activities. Each tier should guide specific actions:
- High-tier parts are those connected to bottleneck assets, safety systems or environmental controls. These parts often justify safety stock, dual sourcing, and inclusion in condition-based inspection programs.
- Mid-tier parts may be best managed through min–max stocking policies or preferred supplier agreements that balance availability with cost.
- Low-tier parts can usually be ordered as needed, freeing capital for investment in higher-impact areas.
With clear tiers in place, maintenance can focus pre-outage checks where they matter most, procurement can strengthen agreements with critical suppliers, and stores teams can apply consistent rules when deciding whether to expedite. The result is a shared playbook where decisions follow defined policies rather than individual judgment.
Building the Right Team for Criticality Scoring
Criticality programs work best when the people who depend on the outcomes have a role in shaping them. A model developed in isolation is more likely to be questioned, while one built collaboratively gains credibility and trust.
In practice, this means engaging leaders from maintenance and reliability, operations management, procurement and stores, engineering and controls, and health, safety, and environmental (HSE) teams. Each group brings perspective on risk, cost, and compliance.
Documenting the rationale behind decisions is equally important. A clear record of why a part was scored a certain way provides transparency in production meetings, supports audits, and ensures continuity when personnel change.
The Cost of Guesswork for Mills
Mills operate in environments where the cost of uncertainty is high. Remote locations extend lead times and tightly connected production lines mean that the failure of a single component can disrupt the entire flow. Margins are often narrow, leaving little room to absorb the expense of rush freight or extended outages.
In pulp and paper, where processes run continuously, downtime compounds quickly. An unplanned stoppage can escalate from hours into days, with significant impact on both cost and customer commitments.
A disciplined approach to parts criticality provides mills with an objective view of where they are most exposed. By aligning teams around a common understanding of which parts matter most, mills can reduce the risk of prolonged downtime and maintain steadier, more predictable operations.
How Remsoft MRO Supports Criticality Scoring
Building an initial scorecard is only the first step. The greater challenge is keeping the process current as conditions change. Criticality programs require governance, regular refresh cycles, and visibility across the systems that guide daily work.
Remsoft MRO supports this by embedding the scoring model directly into the parts master, work orders, kitting lists, and purchasing workflows. When supplier performance shifts, lead times extend, or repeated failures appear in asset data, the scores and tiers update to reflect the new reality.
This integration ensures that decisions are based on current information, not on assumptions from a past meeting. Teams have the guidance they need at the moment of decision, whether they are planning an outage, sourcing a replacement, or reviewing inventory policies.
Parts Criticality as a Foundation for Reliability
For mills, MRO reliability is not a background activity. It is fundamental to sustaining production. Parts criticality provides the structure to move from subjective opinion to objective assessment, aligning teams on where to focus and how to allocate resources.
With Remsoft MRO, that structure becomes part of everyday practice. By embedding criticality into the systems that guide planning, sourcing, and maintenance, mills can reduce surprises, keep production steady, and ensure that crews spend more time executing the plan and less time searching for parts.
