Inventory costs in industrial companies are constantly increasing and tie up a high amount of capital. Spare parts are stocked, which are rarely or never used and have been stored based on standardized procurement methods. However, spare parts are necessary to maintain equipment and to guarantee a failure-free use. Since all materials are often planned in the same way, excessive inventories are accepted. Mostly it is abstained from a more exact planning of the necessary safety, reorder and inventory stock and an intuitive definition is used. Under this aspect the goal of this work is to show optimization potentials for inventory cost reduction of voestalpine Stahl Donawitz GmbH. To make this possible, at the beginning the term spare parts management is defined and associated terminology is discussed. Commonly used methods for inventory analysis will be pointed out and their benefits will be presented. Since spare parts management is directly depending on the used maintenance strategy, common maintenance strategies are discussed and their influences on material management are shown. Based on the theoretically acquired knowledge, selected inventory analyses are used to record the current inventory situation of the company. This analysis will be performed for all settlements to allow a comparison between them and to identify possible differences. Finally, the theoretical basis and the developed analysis will be used to identify possible optimization potentials for inventory cost reduction.