Service Parts Management

With the pressure of time-based competition increasing, and customers demanding faster service, availability of service parts becomes a critical component of manufacturing and servicing operations. Service Parts Management first focuses on intermittent demand forecasting and then on the management of service parts inventories. It guides researchers and practitioners in finding better management solutions to their problems and is both an excellent reference for key concepts and a leading resource for further research. Demand forecasting techniques are presented for parametric and nonparametric approaches, and multi echelon cases and inventory pooling are also considered. Inventory control is examined in the continuous and periodic review cases, while the following are all examined in the context of forecasting: • error measures, • distributional assumptions, and • decision trees. Service Parts Management provides the reader with an overview and a detailed treatment of the current state of the research available on the forecasting and inventory management of items with intermittent demand. It is a comprehensive review of service parts management and provides a starting point for researchers, postgraduate students, and anyone interested in forecasting or managing inventory.

With the pressure of time-based competition increasing, and customers demanding faster service, availability of service parts becomes a critical component of manufacturing and servicing operations. Service Parts Management first focuses on intermittent demand forecasting and then on the management of service parts inventories. It guides researchers and practitioners in finding better management solutions to their problems and is both an excellent reference for key concepts and a leading resource for further research. Demand forecasting techniques are presented for parametric and nonparametric approaches, and multi echelon cases and inventory pooling are also considered. Inventory control is examined in the continuous and periodic review cases, while the following are all examined in the context of forecasting: • error measures, • distributional assumptions, and • decision trees. Service Parts Management provides the reader with an overview and a detailed treatment of the current state of the research available on the forecasting and inventory management of items with intermittent demand. It is a comprehensive review of service parts management and provides a starting point for researchers, postgraduate students, and anyone interested in forecasting or managing inventory.

This well-received text, designed for the students of MBA, BTech (Mechanical Engineering and Industrial and Production Engineering) and MTech (Industrial Engineering and Management), has been revised and reorganized in its second edition. The book, divided into six sections, deals with the concepts of core maintenance and related auxiliary functions, core spares issues, related auxiliary spares functions, caselets and policy cases. This research-based study attempts to impart a comprehensive knowledge of maintenance and spare parts management, particularly in the Indian context. Illustrations, tables, caselets, cases and presentation of several topics in A-Z points add pedagogic value to the text.

Overview No previous works have focused on the topic of inventory reduction and optimization to the extent that this one does. Spare Parts Inventory Management: A Complete Guide to Sparesology(tm) by Philip Slater covers the whole part's life cycle, from initial purchase to final disposal, and addresses issues throughout, including maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO). The author, Phillip Slater, was described in a recent podcast as "truly one of the leaders in the MRO information segment." Sparesology is a term coined by Slater to describe the discipline of optimizing the physical, financial, and human resource management processes of spare parts inventory management. Sparesology is much more than just inventory optimization. It involves an understanding of the complete "ecosystem," within which the spare parts inventory is managed, and seeks to ensure that all of the factors influencing this management work together to achieve an organization's goals.

This book focusses on the after sales business and presents the Service Parts Planning (SPP) solution which was developed by SAP in a joint effort with Caterpillar and Ford in order to address the specific planning problems of service parts. The book explains the processes, structures, and functions of this solution and is targeted at decision makers, project members and project managers who are involved in an implementation of SAP Service Parts Planning or for users who want to gain a better understanding of the state of art in spare parts planning and the SAP Service Parts Planning software.

INTERMITTENT DEMAND FORECASTING The first text to focus on the methods and approaches of intermittent, rather than fast, demand forecasting Intermittent Demand Forecasting is for anyone who is interested in improving forecasts of intermittent demand products, and enhancing the management of inventories. Whether you are a practitioner, at the sharp end of demand planning, a software designer, a student, an academic teaching operational research or operations management courses, or a researcher in this field, we hope that the book will inspire you to rethink demand forecasting. If you do so, then you can contribute towards significant economic and environmental benefits. No prior knowledge of intermittent demand forecasting or inventory management is assumed in this book. The key formulae are accompanied by worked examples to show how they can be implemented in practice. For those wishing to understand the theory in more depth, technical notes are provided at the end of each chapter, as well as an extensive and up-to-date collection of references for further study. Software developments are reviewed, to give an appreciation of the current state of the art in commercial and open source software. “Intermittent demand forecasting may seem like a specialized area but actually is at the center of sustainability efforts to consume less and to waste less. Boylan and Syntetos have done a superb job in showing how improvements in inventory management are pivotal in achieving this. Their book covers both the theory and practice of intermittent demand forecasting and my prediction is that it will fast become the bible of the field.” —Spyros Makridakis, Professor, University of Nicosia, and Director, Institute for the Future and the Makridakis Open Forecasting Center (MOFC). “We have been able to support our clients by adopting many of the ideas discussed in this excellent book, and implementing them in our software. I am sure that these ideas will be equally helpful for other supply chain software vendors and for companies wanting to update and upgrade their capabilities in forecasting and inventory management.” —Suresh Acharya, VP, Research and Development, Blue Yonder. “As product variants proliferate and the pace of business quickens, more and more items have intermittent demand. Boylan and Syntetos have long been leaders in extending forecasting and inventory methods to accommodate this new reality. Their book gathers and clarifies decades of research in this area, and explains how practitioners can exploit this knowledge to make their operations more efficient and effective.” —Thomas R. Willemain, Professor Emeritus, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Most successful organizations recognize Maintenance Parts and Procurement as a critical success factor to Asset Management Excellence and their fundamental supply chain value proposition. This book works as a guide to all the stakeholders that influence the success of their Maintenance Parts Operation and their enterprise’s bottom line. Maintenance Parts Management Excellence: A Holistic Anatomy defines the Maintenance Parts Managements role in Asset Management Excellence and expands on the importance of the Parts Inventory Planner role in an organization. It discusses how to create a unique Maintenance Parts Management Strategy for an organization and offers insights on the multiple strategies needed to create and maintain a Maintenance Parts inventory policy. The book also provides an organized overall approach to creating Maintenance Parts Management Excellence in an enterprise. Executives with an organization responsible for the construction, management, and disposal of all assets classes (plant, equipment, IT assets), consultants responsible for assignments associated with optimizing life cycle decisions for clients, maintenance, and reliability professionals within an organization, will benefit from this professional plus book. Upper-level undergraduate engineering students, as well as graduate students of management who focus on operations management and engineering graduate students addressing issues of maintenance and reliability engineering, may also be interested in this book.

This book focuses on the tactical planning level for spare parts management. It describes a series of multi-item inventory models and presents exact and heuristic optimization methods, including greedy heuristics that work well for real, life-sized problems. The intended audience consists of graduate students, starting scholars in the field of spare parts inventory control, and spare parts planning specialists in the industry. In individual chapters the authors consider topics including: a basic single-location model; single-location models with multiple machine types and/or machine groups; the multi-location model with lateral transshipments; the classical METRIC model and its generalization to multi-indenture systems; and a single-location model with an explicit modeling of the repair capacity for failed parts and the priorities that one can set there. Various chapters of the book are used in a master course at Eindhoven University of Technology and in a PhD course of the Graduate Program Operations Management and Logistics (a Dutch network that organizes PhD courses in the field of OM&L). The required pre-knowledge consists of probability theory and basic knowledge of Markov processes and queuing theory. End-of-chapter problems appear for all chapters, with some answers appearing in an appendix.