Spare parts inventory control based on maintenance planning

For many maintenance organizations, on-condition maintenance tasks are the most important source of spare part demand. An uneven distribution of maintenance tasks over time is an important cause for intermittency in spare parts demand, and this intermittency complicates spare parts inventory control severely. In an attempt to partially overcome these complications, we propose to use the maintenance plan, i.e. the planned maintenance tasks, as a source of advance demand information. We propose a simple forecasting mechanism to estimate the spare part demand distribution based on the maintenance plan, and develop a dynamic inventory control method based on these forecasts. The value of this approach is benchmarked against state-of-the art time series forecast methods, using data from two large maintenance organizations. We find that the proposed method can yield cost savings of 23 to 51% compared to the traditional methods.