Transforming Spare Parts from Afterthought to Strategic Engine

For many capital equipment providers, spare parts are both the most profitable activity and the least strategically managed. They sit between engineering, supply chain, sales, and customer operations, and are therefore both exposed to organisational silos and critical to long-term performance.

At the Spare Parts Business Platform 2026 – Power of 50, Dr. Ioannis Chatzilamprou from Metso revealed how the company’s spare parts business can unlock resilience, profitability, and sustainability at the same time, even under the pressure of divestments and structural change.

From Project-Driven to Lifecycle-Driven: Why Mindset Matters

In many engineering-led organisations, decades of success in capital projects have shaped the culture. Winning and executing projects has been the primary focus. The aftermarket has been treated as a necessary but secondary activity. That mindset becomes a liability once markets mature, competition intensifies, and growth increasingly comes from the installed base rather than new builds.

In the “golden years” of project business, equipment manufacturers often handed over complete engineering documentation to customers. This made project execution easier at the time, but, in practice, enabled customers and local workshops to source spare parts independently for decades.

A company may be the original technology provider and global leader in its domain, with thousands of proprietary machines in the field, but still struggles to capture aftermarket value because:

• Documentation is scattered or archived in obsolete formats;
• Installed base data is incomplete or outdated;
• Customer contact has lapsed over long equipment lifecycles;
• Internal teams focus on new projects rather than lifecycle performance.

As such, reframing spare parts from reactive order processing to the core of a lifecycle value proposition can be a key driver of environmental and commercial performance.

Using a Divestment as a Catalyst for Resilience

Organisations rarely transform because it seems like a good idea. They transform when they must.

For Metso, the catalyst was a strategic decision to divest a specific plant solutions business within metals refining. Overnight, a sizeable aftermarket operation found itself facing a future outside its traditional organisational support structure. It had to become:

• Smaller, but global in coverage;
• More agile, with faster response times;
• Sharper in its value proposition, appealing to potential buyers and customers.

This pressure forced a fundamental reassessment of how spare parts were managed and sold. Several structural challenges were exposed, including a large global installed base with many ageing assets, fragmented customer relationships, incomplete or outdated documentation that made part identification difficult, and increasing competition from customers able to reproduce parts themselves.

Under these conditions, traditional reactive approaches, such as waiting for enquiries and handling requests case by case, were no longer viable, requiring a more proactive, focused, and lifecycle-oriented approach.

Radical Simplification: From “Everything for Everyone” to Strategic Focus

A widespread assumption in spare parts management is that more items in the catalogue automatically equal more opportunities for revenue.

When the company’s spare parts database was reviewed in detail, it became clear that a significant portion of the listed parts had not been sold, in some cases for years. Carrying this complexity was adding cost and friction without adding value.

The organisation reduced more than 20,000 spare parts items in its portfolio down to roughly 3,000, focusing only on what was truly profitable and strategically relevant.

This simplification was guided by three principles:

1. Focus on proprietary equipment: Priority was given to parts for equipment where the company held the design and technological edge, the assets where its R&D investments and know-how translated into genuine differentiation and higher customer value.
2. Protect critical third-party content: For third-party equipment that formed an integral part of proprietary solutions, the emphasis was on maintaining the ability to support customers with complete solutions rather than acting as a generic parts reseller.
3. Align portfolio with actual demand and margin: Items that were not ordered, not profitable, or not strategically relevant were removed. The aim was to build a lean portfolio that paid the bills and funded future development.

This focus did more than clean up data. It clarified internal priorities, reduced complexity in quotation and fulfilment processes, and allowed teams to redirect attention from maintaining a bloated catalogue to actively developing value-added offerings.

From Selling Parts to Designing Maintenance: The Rise of Kits and Sets

Another major shift involved rethinking not just what is sold, but how it is sold.

Instead of treating spare parts as individual components to be ordered piece by piece, the organisation reframed them in terms of maintenance events, to mirror how mechanical and maintenance teams actually work during shutdowns and planned stops.

As such, three types of offers were designed:

• Single parts: Individual items for ad-hoc needs;
• Sets: Predefined collections of parts for specific subassemblies or functions;
• Maintenance kits: Complete, sealed packages containing everything required for a given intervention on a given piece of equipment.

A typical maintenance kit might include O-rings, gaskets, seal rings, bearings, and other small components, all cleaned, packed, and ready for use in demanding plant environments. For the customer’s maintenance teams, this means no time wasted hunting through multiple warehouse shelves; no risk of missing a critical small part during a shutdown; and reduced risk of contamination and higher reliability.

For the supplier, these kits deliver several advantages:

• Clearer value proposition: Selling uptime and reduced risk rather than individual items;
• Higher share of wallet: More components included per intervention;
• Better forecasting: Maintenance cycles become the basis for demand planning;
• Stronger stickiness: Customers come to rely on OEM-defined kits as the standard.

The development and acceptance of these maintenance kits required close dialogue with customers’ operations and mechanical engineers. Once these users understood that the approach was aligned with their realities and supported by engineering know-how, acceptance in the market increased significantly.

Bringing Spare Parts into the Capital Project Conversation

Traditionally, many OEMs only address spare parts needs near commissioning or when the plant is already running. By that point, time pressure, budget exhaustion, and commercial tension typically lead to reactive, price-driven negotiations. However, Metso pulled spare parts forward into the earliest project discussions.

Commissioning spares treated as non-negotiable  

Commissioning spares were outside the main contract pricing discussion and tied directly to warranty and performance guarantees. Without properly defined commissioning spares, there is no warranty and no performance commitment. This reframing reduces the perception of spares as an optional cost to be negotiated and anchors them as an integral part of a successful project.

Lifecycle dialogue embedded in project sales  

Capital sales teams were trained not only to sell plants, but to understand and articulate what each plant and each piece of equipment would need during its lifecycle. Conversations with customers began to include topics such as maintenance regimes, shutdown preparation, and the role of standardized kits and sets in ensuring smooth operations.

This approach avoided the typical firefighting mode of last-minute spare parts requests before shutdowns, and allowed the supplier to position lifecycle support as a strategic part of the project.

Managing Export Control and Compliance as a Competitive Capability

Export control and trade compliance have become significantly more complex due to shifting geopolitics, sanctions, and regional regulations. For global industrial suppliers, the ability to navigate this complexity efficiently is increasingly a competitive differentiator.

The company treated export control as an integral design parameter rather than a downstream hurdle.

For new equipment and associated spare parts, harmonised system (HS) codes and export classifications were defined simultaneously. Single parts, sets, and kits were given their own trade codes as part of the project execution, enabling a smooth handover from capital project to operational spares without duplicating work or exposing the business to compliance risk.

This proactive approach:

• Reduced lead times and administrative burden for repeat orders;
• Limited rework and back-and-forth with trade compliance units;
• Strengthened customer trust by demonstrating control over a sensitive area.

Given that many customers outsource logistics and even engineering, having a supplier that can reliably manage export and compliance end-to-end becomes an attractive proposition.

Rebuilding Proximity to the Installed Base

A critical enabler of the transformation was a renewed focus on understanding the installed base and reconnecting with plant personnel.

The organisation invested in:

• Segmenting customers and installed plants by technology, criticality, and potential.
• Training spare parts and service teams on process understanding and what specific equipment requires when it is down.
• Bringing employees to sites to see equipment in real conditions, capture images, and correlate them with internal product portfolios.

This pragmatic exposure bridged an important gap. Many internal staff had previously quoted parts for years without ever seeing the actual machine, its environment, or the context of use. Visual and operational understanding enabled more accurate recommendations, faster response times, and more relevant discussions with both engineers and procurement.

Balancing Direct Shipments and Supplier Relationships

In parallel with business transformation, sustainability targets pushed the organisation to optimise logistics and reduce emissions. One lever was to ship certain spare parts directly from long-standing suppliers to end customers, bypassing central warehouses where it made sense.

This approach reduced transport-related CO2 emissions and delivery lead times. However, it also required solutions for preventing suppliers from bypassing the OEM and approaching customers directly once they had visibility of end destinations.

The mitigation strategy relied on:

• Working only with long-term, trusted suppliers with relationships spanning decades.
• Treating these suppliers as strategic partners rather than transactional vendors.
• Ensuring that internal sourcing and tactical procurement functions understood the business context, volumes, and strategic importance of each relationship.

While there is always a thin line to manage, especially in regions with strict competition law, well-managed partnerships can achieve a win-win, better service and sustainability performance for customers, and stable, value-added business for both OEM and supplier.

Quantified Impact: Resilience Turned into Results

The transformation of the spare parts business was not purely conceptual. It translated into measurable improvements over several years, including:

• Approximately 45% increase in orders;
• Roughly 30% improvement in adjusted EBITDA for the business in question;
• Shorter response times due to better clarity on installed base needs and standardized offerings;
• More proactive customer engagement ahead of shutdowns, enabling better planning and reduced operational risk.

Beyond the numbers, the most significant achievement is the organisational mindset. Teams previously separated by silos began to operate around the shared understanding that value is created over the lifecycle, not only at the moment the plant is sold.

Implications for Industrial Leaders

Industrial and manufacturing executives may take away the following key considerations.

1. Use pressure as a transformation trigger
   Divestments, restructuring, or performance crises can be powerful catalysts to rethink how the aftermarket is run. Rather than treating them purely as risk events, they can be used to force clarity on what truly creates value.
2. Simplify to amplify
   A smaller, better-curated spare parts portfolio can generate more profit and better customer outcomes than an oversized catalogue. Complexity is a cost, focus is a strategic asset.
3. Design for maintenance, not just operation
   Packaging parts into maintenance kits and sets aligned with real shutdown procedures unlocks value for customers and deepens OEM relevance.
4. Bring lifecycle thinking into project sales
   Spare parts and lifecycle agreements discussed early in the sales process move the conversation from price to reliability, uptime, and risk management.
5. Treat export control and compliance as core competence
   In a volatile geopolitical landscape, smooth, compliant flows of equipment and spares become part of the value proposition.
6. Make the installed base visible and tangible internally
   Regular exposure of internal teams to real plants and equipment shortens learning curves and improves service quality.

Ultimately, the aftermarket spare parts are not a back-office function. They are a strategic engine for profitability, customer loyalty, and sustainability, provided the organisation is willing to shift mindset, break silos, and redesign the business around lifecycle value.