A heuristic to minimize the inventory value of repairable parts with service constraints: application to an airline company

• Cardós, Manuel ^[1] ; Babiloni, Eugenia ^[1] ; Palmer, Marta E. ^[1] ; Guijarro, Ester ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

     Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

     Valencia, España

     
• Localización: Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management, ISSN-e 2013-0953, Vol. 6, Nº. Extra 3, 2013, págs. 771-778
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Purpose: This paper focuses on the improvement of the inventory management of repairable parts of the airline company Air Nostrum. The company uses a common sales replacement policy to manage their repairable parts and the same target fill rate for every item. This target is very high in order to assure a high availability of the aircrafts, dealing also to a high inventory value. Design/methodology/approach: However, this paper shows that an alternative heuristic approach outperforms the previous one terms of inventory value while fulfilling the target fill rate. Findings and Originality/value: This improvement is illustrated with an extensive and real dataset and may lead to a significant inventory reduction. Originality/value: Therefore, a company can design its inventory policies applying this heuristic focused on inventory reduction with a service level constraint instead of the usual cost optimization or service level fulfillment.