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Inventory management of spare parts in an energy company

2014; Palgrave Macmillan; Volume: 66; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1057/jors.2014.8

1476-9360

Mario Guajardo, Mikael Rönnqvist, Ann Mari Halvorsen, Svein Inge Kallevik,

Multi-Criteria Decision Making

AbstractAbstractWe address the problem of how to determine control parameters for the inventory of spare parts of an energy company. The prevailing policy is based on an (s, S) system subject to a fill rate constraint. The parameters are decided based mainly on the expert judgment of the planners at different plants. The company is pursuing to conform all planners to the same approach, and to be more cost efficient. Our work focuses on supporting these goals. We test seven demand models using real-world data for about 21 000 items. We find that significant differences in cost and service level may appear from using one or another model. We propose a decision rule to select an appropriate model. Our approach allows us to recommend control parameters for 97.9% of the items. We also explore the impact of pooling inventory for different demand sources and the inaccuracy arising from duplicate item codes.Keywords: inventoryspare partsdemand modelfill raterecord inaccuracyoil AcknowledgementsWe are grateful to discussants and audiences at ISIR Summer School Istanbul 2011, INFORMS Annual Meeting Charlotte 2011, EurOMA Cambridge 2011, Statoil Kompetansedager Bergen 2011, NHH Seminar Geilo 2012, EURO Vilnius 2012 and ILS Quebec 2012 for their valuable comments. We thank the anonymous reviewers, whose comments improved the final version of the article. We also thank Vivienne Knowles and Vegard Engeset for their help in bringing this article to fruition.