Sponsor:

Naval Supply Systems Command

Research Team:

Manuel D. Rossetti

Universities Involved:

University of Arkansas

Start Date:

07/15/02

End Date:

07/15/03

Summary:

The objectives of this project are to evaluate an inventory model that can develop CWT spares budgets for the Navy and Air Force, examine a common integrated spares model that can be implemented in a commercial Advanced Planning System (APS), and reduce total inventory investment necessary while achieving comparable or better performance and meeting the high logistics system performance standards of the Navy and Air Force.
This report presents the outcomes of research done towards integrating wholesale and retail inventory models to achieve readiness based customer wait time goals for the multi-echelon multi-indentured inventory system of the US Naval Supply Systems command. We investigated customer wait time modeling and trade-offs associated with alignment of wholesale and retail inventory levels. We also explored the merits and demerits of using the LMI’s SCOPE simulator to evaluate the software solutions for NAVSUP’s readiness based sparing model. We present an analysis of our evaluations of the three available software solutions for wholesale and retail sparing. The methodology of evaluation was based on a detailed study of various aspects in the modeling of multi-indentured multi-echelon inventory systems and analytical tools to compare the three solutions based on some important criteria. The observations of our study, subsequent recommendations and the results of the comparative analysis between the three available software solutions have been detailed in the report. We have also delved into the aspects of inventory segmentation issue considering its high relevance after the customer wait time based sparing model is implemented by NAVSUP. We have suggested a segmentation methodology and proved its feasibility through some initial experimentation, the results of which are also presented in this report. Our future research in this area is continuing and we hope to develop a segmentation methodology that will align with NAVSUP’S readiness based customer wait time sparing model.