Author : A. S. Lawal and B. Kareem

The effective maintenance will minimize the chance of failure of spare parts and thereby maximize overall profit of operations, which is required for economic manufacturing. The study has strategically classified spare parts in related to the inventory cost(s) utilizing schedule maintenance period, economic order quantity, optimum period of supply and optimum number order. The model developed to forecast for spare parts requirement in the automobile maintenance industry has made use of simple exponential smoothing method. The reliability of critical parts and failure pattern were considered for the formulation of the generalized spare parts inventory model, under negative exponential distribution. The model was tested with data collected on D6c manual in a Maintenance Organization. ABC analysis was used to analyze the data from which the most critical parts (called class A) were identified which served as input into the model. Thereafter, the model was numerically analyzed using linear multiple regression method. The finding generally shows that the cost of critical specific spare part varies with maintenance scheduling time and quantity of order, number of order, and time of order. Besides, the study also shows that it is profitable to schedule maintenance annually than lesser periods.

Keywords: Maintenance, failure, spare parts, criticality, inventory, strategy