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David Bucher, Joern Meissner
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| Abstract |
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Spare parts management recently attracted the attention of inventory research,
due to the increasing pressure on companies to deliver high after-sale service for
their products. In particular, the automotive and machine manufacturing industries
are confronted with customers demanding a high availability of spare parts
to minimize downtime costs. Additionally, companies need to hold an increasing
variety of spare parts, as the demand for customized products leads to a higher
number SKUs (stock-keeping units) to be held as spares. Many spare part SKUs
have an underlying intermittent demand pattern, which makes forecasting and
safety stock planning a difficult task. The high service level required by the market,
the high number of SKUs and the intermittent nature of demand constitute a
great challenge for the inventory management.
In this case-study based research project a wide range of statistical distributions
is examined for the safety stock planning of spare parts. Based on a data set
including historic demand series of over 24,000 SKUs over 55 months from [censored],
a major company of the German automotive industry, Goodness-of-Fit tests
are conducted to evaluate the ability of the statistical distributions to approximate
the intermittent demand pattern. Further, simulations over the 55 months horizon
were run for inventory systems using the statistical distributions for safety
stock planning in order to gain insights about which distributions perform best in
terms of service level achievement and inventory cost, whether the choice of the
statistical distributions has a big impact on the overall performance of the inventory
system and whether the Goodness-of-Fit tests correspond to the results from
the simulation, which is to say whether the Goodness-of-Fit tests can be used as
decision support tool when choosing an appropriate statistical distribution. |
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| Keywords |
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Spare Parts, Forecasting, Safety Stock, Intermittent Demand Approximation, Statistical Distribution, Goodness of Fit, Case Study
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| Status |
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Working Paper |
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| Download |
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www.meiss.com/download/SC-Bucher-Meissner.pdf
(44 kb) |
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| Reference |
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BibTeX,
Plain Text |
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