Last time buy and repair decisions for spare parts

S. Behfard, M.C. van der Heijden, A. Al Hanbali and W.H.M. Zijm

European Journal of Operational Research, 2015, vol. 244, issue 2, 498-510

Abstract: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's) of advanced capital goods often offer service contracts for system support to their customers, for which spare parts are needed. Due to technological changes, suppliers of spare parts may stop production at some point in time. As a reaction to that decision, an OEM may place a so-called Last Time Buy (LTB) order to cover demand for spare parts during the remaining service period, which may last for many years. The fact that there might be other alternative sources of supply in the next periods complicates the decision on the LTB. In this paper, we develop a heuristic method to find the near-optimal LTB quantity in presence of an imperfect repair option of the failed parts that can be returned from the field. Comparison of our method to simulation shows high approximation accuracy. Numerical experiments reveal that repair is an excellent option as alternative sourcing, even if it is more expensive than buying a new part, because of the option to postpone the repair until the parts are needed. In addition, we show the impact of other key parameters on costs and LTB quantity.

Keywords: Inventory; Stochastic processes; Spare parts; Last time buy; Repair (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722171500082X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:244:y:2015:i:2:p:498-510

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.02.003

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().