Tactical Inventory Planning at Alcatel-Lucent’s Repair and Exchange Services

Mustafa K. Doğru () and Ulaş Özen ()
Additional contact information
Mustafa K. Doğru: Verizon Communications, Basking Ridge, New Jersey 07920
Ulaş Özen: Ozyegin University, Cekmekoy, İstanbul, 34794 Turkey

Interfaces, 2015, vol. 45, issue 3, 228-242

Abstract: Alcatel-Lucent, a major telecommunications equipment manufacturer, provides equipment, solutions, and services to customers worldwide. Post-sales support services are a growing business segment for the company, and require significant investment in spare parts. The inventory investment constitutes a considerable portion of the total cost of providing post-sales support services for new customer contracts; it is also an important element in estimating new contract offerings and evaluating and redesigning business processes that affect inventories. Because of Alcatel-Lucent’s two-echelon supply chain structure, inventory sizing for post-sales support services is a complicated task that spreadsheet applications cannot handle adequately. Thus, the company’s repair and exchange services (RES) group needed a fast, user-friendly, and generic software solution with advanced analytic capabilities to support its business tendering and evaluation processes. To meet this requirement, we developed the tactical inventory planning tool, which uses stochastic modeling and optimization algorithms, for this purpose. Although the tool’s primary function is to support the RES business tendering process, it has also been useful in other business analysis because of its generic nature.

Keywords: spare-parts inventory management; multiple-item/multiechelon inventory system; stochastic modeling; heuristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.2014.0782 (application/pdf)

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:inm:orinte:v:45:y:2015:i:3:p:228-242

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Interfaces from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().