Six questions to estimate how much of your MRO inventory value is tied up in parts that will never be used.
Dead stock is inventory with no consumption history and no foreseeable demand. It sits on the shelf, carries insurance and carrying cost, and contributes nothing. Every storeroom has some. The question is how much, and whether you know the difference between dead stock, insurance stock, and active stock that just happens to move slowly.
This self-assessment walks you through six diagnostic questions that target the most common sources of dead stock accumulation: items with no issues in 12+ months, the insurance spare classification gap, inventory tied to retired assets, reorder points set higher than annual consumption, project and turnaround surplus, and stale ABC classifications. Each question includes the Maximo context: which tables, which fields, what to look for.
Answer yes to 0 to 1 questions and your storeroom is likely under 10% dead stock. Two to three yes answers puts you in the 10% to 20% range, which is common and recoverable with a targeted review. Four or more means significant capital is trapped and a formal inventory rationalization is warranted. The assessment includes a scoring table that maps your answers to likely exposure levels.
Dead stock is the single biggest drag on Inventory Turns. Every dollar of dead stock sits in your Average Inventory Value denominator, pulling your turns number down without contributing anything to the numerator. Remove the dead stock and your effective turns jump immediately. That is why dead stock analysis is the first step in any inventory turns improvement effort, not the last.
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This assessment tells you where to look. The full Maximo KPI Guide: Inventory Turns covers Dead Stock % as a companion metric alongside Inventory Turns and Part Stockout Rate, including the Maximo queries for all three metrics, the segmentation methodology, and the drilldown diagnostic from aggregate to root cause.