Inventory Management Of Automobile Spare Parts Based On Lateral Transshipment

In recent years, it has become an increasing demand for automobile maintenance service in China. To automobile maintenance businesses, spare parts inventory management is important and difficult in daily operations. When one shop of the enterprises can't fulfill the explosive demand, the traditional replenish method cannot accomplish the order in time because of the long leadtime of the spare parts. But at the same time, other chain shops may still have the remaining spare parts. In this situation, it is necessary to allocate the spare parts with lateral transshipment to satisfy the emergency replenish demand. In addition, the enterprises expect to reach a certain service fulfillment rate while minimizing the amount of spare parts. We take the effect of lateral transshipment into the decision making of the spare parts inventory level. It is meaningful to use lateral transshipment policy to lower the safety stock. So we focus on spare parts inventory management based on lateral transshipment for automobile maintenance chain enterprises in this thesis.The main contents of this thesis are as follows:(1) Analyzing the characteristics of automobile maintenance spare parts inventory shows that the shortcomings of the traditional vertical replenishment strategies. We propose lateral transshipment strategies in automobile maintenance enterprises and analyze the economic applicability of the strategies with pointing out the application conditions of lateral transshipment strategies. Through the comparison with traditional replenish method, the application of lateral transshipment is a useful way to solve the emergency stockout.(2) We apply the theory of lateral transshipment to automobile maintenance spare parts inventory management in single period. In order to allocate multi-type spare parts, we build an inventory optimization model based on lateral transshipment and use numerical experiments to verify the effects of the model. We make comparisons between lateral transshipment and traditional replenish method. With the numerical experiments, we examine the effect of saving inventory cost and the effect of increasing the fulfillment rate with the optimization solution.(3) Features of the automobile maintenance enterprises operations in multi-period inventory management are analyzed. The results show that periodic ordering mode is more suitable for automobile maintenance enterprises. The partial pooling strategies has been built to solve the multi-period ordering problems. With the result of analyzation, we build an inventory lateral transshipment model with periodic ordering. By numerical experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed model are verified and we make the optimal transshipment decision which improves the effect of lateral transshipment in multi-period situations.In this thesis, we propose lateral transshipment strategies to solve emergency spare parts' stockout problems in automobile maintenance chain enterprises. In case of multi-inventory points, multi-type spare parts, we make the optimal transshipment decision for each chain shop which can reduce the total inventory cost and increase the service fulfillment rate.