Optimization of service parts planning for InFocus

A common problem faced by many industry companies, including InFocus, is that they are holding excess inventories and incurring unnecessary inventory holding costs yet are not able to achieve their expected customer service levels. This problem is critical to be addressed for companies who are striving to lower their supply chain costs and improve their management efficiencies. One solution to this problem is to use better forecasting methods and employ the appropriate inventory management policies. The objective of this project is to review the software package, Servigistics software tool, used by InFocus, to evaluate if it is suitable for InFocus' operations and to identify any improper practices when using Servigistics. The first step to address the problem is to review and evaluate Servigistics software package qualitatively. We found that Servigistics is a sound software tool with appropriate inventory and forecasting formulas. But the information fed into Servigistics is not accurate and up-to-date; this results in inaccurate results output by the Servigistics software. The second step is to evaluate Servigistics' output and InFocus' inventory management policy quantitatively.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Ni, Yang, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen C. Graves.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38289

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38289