Research Paper

Research Paper: Stockout Risk Estimation and Expediting for Repairable Spare Parts

Jan 03, 2022

Stockouts of repairable spares usually lead to significant downtime costs. Managers of Maintenance Repair Organizations seek advance indicators of future stockouts which might allow them to take proactive actions that are beneficial for achieving target service levels with reasonable costs. Among such (proactive) actions, the most common, and most cost-effective one is expediting existing repair processes.

This research paper written by Prof. Gurhan Kok, Asst. Prof. Mustafa Hekimoglu and Mustafa Şahin focuses on developing an advance stockout risk estimation system for repairable spare parts. The method considers different statistics, such as the number of ongoing repair processes, demand rate, repair time to estimate stockout risk of a repairable part for a given planning horizon. In the field tests with empirical data, the suggested method overperforms two heuristic approaches and achieves accuracy rates of 63% for a 15 day-planning horizon and 83% for 45 days.

The research paper suggests a repairable inventory control system including repair expediting, inspection and condemnation processes. To optimize the control parameters, it suggests a simple algorithm considering two constraints: Target service level and maximum fraction of expedited demand.

The algorithm used in this research paper is proved to be efficient for finding the optimum policy parameter in the tests with empirical data which suggests savings up to 8%.

Download this research paper to find out more about the stockout estimation model that achieves a prediction accuracy of 83%.