In the economy of any country, the auto parts manufacturing sector holds an important percentage in the national automotive industry. The dynamics of sales within it can vary significantly on short term, depending on the automotive market trend. This is also the case of the current situation in...

This research involves the combination of spare parts management and reverse logistics. At the end of the product life cycle, products in the field (so called installed base) can usually be serviced by either new parts, obtained from a Last Time Buy, or by repaired failed parts. This paper,...

In airline industries, the aircraft maintenance cost takes up about 13% of the total operating cost. It can be reduced by a good planning. Spare parts inventories exist to serve the maintenance planning. Compared with commonly used reorder point system (ROP) and forecasting methods which only...

This paper presents results of a large-scale simulation study on spare parts demand forecasting and inventory control to select best policies within each SKU category. Simulations were conducted over 10,032 SKUs of an automaker that operates in Brazil, considering six years of demand data....

This paper proposes a spare part classification method based on item criticality. Starting from a multi-criteria analysis, the proposed model converts relevant criteria impacting item criticality into a single score presenting the criticality level. The obtained criticality level is used to...

Manufacturers supplying products under warranty need a strategy to deal with failures during the warranty period: repair the product or replace it by a new one, depending on e.g. age and/or usage of the failed product. An (implicit) assumption in virtually all models is that new products to...

Spare parts demands are usually generated by the need of maintenance either preventively or at failures. These demands are difficult to predict based on historical data of past spare parts usages, and therefore, the optimal inventory control policy may be also difficult to obtain. However, it is...

This paper investigates the gap between research and practice in spare parts management, with specific reference to durable goods addressed to private or professional customers. The paper provides a critical literature review of theoretical contributions about spare parts classification and...

The interface between intellectual property and competition policy is a difficult one. Both aim to correct for market failure in the pursuit of economic efficiency. However, in correcting for one market failure, we may exacerbate another. This article raises a number of specific issues which...

Many retailers find it useful to partition customers into multiple classes based on certain characteristics. We consider the case in which customers are primarily distinguished by whether they are willing to wait for backordered demand. A firm that faces demand from customers that are...