Spare Parts Inventory Management: A Literature Review

Shuai Zhang,Yufei Yuan,Kai Huang

doi:10.3390/su13052460

Abstract

Spare parts are held as inventory to support product maintenance in order to reduce downtime and extend the lifetime of products. Recently, spare parts inventory management has been attracting more attention due to the “right-to-repair” movement which requires that manufacturers provide sufficient spare parts throughout the life-cyle of their products to reduce waste so as to achieve sustainability. In this review, 148 papers regarding spare parts inventory management published from 2010 to 2020 are examined. The studies are classified based on two groups of perspectives. The first group includes the characteristics of spare parts, products, inventory systems, and supply chains, while the second group focuses on the characteristics of research methodologies and topics in the reviewed studies. The novelty of this literature review is three-fold. Firstly, we focus on analyzing the supply chain structure of different inventory networks for managing spare parts. Secondly, we classify the current literature based on analytics techniques, i.e., descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Finally, the research gaps in this field are discussed from the perspective of reverse logistics, consumer durable goods, inventory network structure and policy, spare parts demand pattern modeling, and big data analytics.

Highlights

IntroductionManufacturers usually advocate for a culture of planned obsolescence
The basic idea of approximation methods is that when the objective function in the studied problem is hard to evaluate, that function can be sampled at a few points to create a fit, and optimization is performed on this fit
To clearly present the developing trend of spare parts inventory management research, the reviewed studies are grouped according to the publication year

Summary

Introduction

Manufacturers usually advocate for a culture of planned obsolescence The idea of such a culture is to design their products to be short-lived and make products hard to repair, so that customers are encouraged to purchase more. The carbon emissions of producing the newest iPhone account for nearly 80 percent of the total emissions during its life-cycle [1] To discourage this culture and achieve supply chain sustainability, a movement known as “right to repair” is starting to make progress in pushing for legislation that requires companies make their parts, tools, and information available to consumers and repair shops [2].

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion