Spare Parts Inventory Management: A Literature Review

Abstract

Spare parts are held as inventory to support product maintenance in order to reduce downtime and extend the lifetime of products. Recently, spare parts inventory management has been attracting more attention due to the “right-to-repair” movement which requires that manufacturers provide sufficient spare parts throughout the life-cyle of their products to reduce waste so as to achieve sustainability. In this review, 148 papers regarding spare parts inventory management published from 2010 to 2020 are examined. The studies are classified based on two groups of perspectives. The first group includes the characteristics of spare parts, products, inventory systems, and supply chains, while the second group focuses on the characteristics of research methodologies and topics in the reviewed studies. The novelty of this literature review is three-fold. Firstly, we focus on analyzing the supply chain structure of different inventory networks for managing spare parts. Secondly, we classify the current literature based on analytics techniques, i.e., descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Finally, the research gaps in this field are discussed from the perspective of reverse logistics, consumer durable goods, inventory network structure and policy, spare parts demand pattern modeling, and big data analytics.