| Summary |
Po-Yen Huang, 2007,06
Institute of Traffic and Transportation National Chiao Tung University
The competition of domestic automobile industry is fierce. Besides new car's selling, the automobile industry competition has already extended to the after-sales service. The customers would like to go back to the customer care center to maintain cars due to the high quality maintenance service, and then the automobile service shop could earn the profit. Furthermore, how to manage the inventory of expensive repair parts, increase the supplying rate of the parts, and shorten the time of acquiring the parts, are the critical factors of promoting after-sale service.
This research develops an optimal model which considers multi-item, periodic review inventory system for expensive repair parts of domestic automobile from the viewpoint of single automobile service shop. In order to cut down replenishment time for improving the customer service level and complete the repair assignment, the model adds the penalty cost of shortage. Additionally, to satisfy the demand of repair parts, the model especially considers two ways of transshipment operations, lateral transshipment and emergency replenishment. As a result, our goal is to minimize the total costs to determine the optimal inventory level of expensive repair parts under the transshipment options.
Our empirical results show that automobile service shops should adopt zero inventory strategy for all expensive repair parts. The strategy is similar to the current way by automobile service shops, and it could gain the minimun total costs. In order to improve service quality and customer satisfaction, automobile service shops should enforce low inventory policy for high value parts. Low inventory strategy could meet all maintenance demand with transshipment operations, and its cost has no significant difference with zero inventory strategy. |
