Apply 6-Sigma Concepts DMAIC to Improve Spare Parts Inventory Management
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Chen, Wei-wen
DOI
en-US
Abstract
As known in the world, 6-Sigma was developed by Motorola more than 20 years ago. Today, almost in each industry, 6-Sigma is still widely used in lots of companies in the defects elimination & process improving. Also known, DMAIC is one of two key methodologies of 6-Sigma & to be used in the existing business process improvement. From it’s 5 steps processes - Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve & Control, we can systematically go through data collecting, problems measuring then finding out process defects and developing the efficient solutions.
About inventories, they are the must operational elements in each company and existing with different kinds of inventory types - raw materials (RM), work in process (WIP), finished goods (FG), spare parts & miscellaneous supplies. Although too much inventories would cause company dropping into poor finance situation, yet proper inventory is definitely needed to provide minimum or even better customer service. Therefore, the inventory management goals are to meet both higher customer service & lower inventory cost targets. At the same time, try to use the most limited resources, i.e., lowest operations cost, to reach above customer service & inventory cost dual targets. From every textbook, there were some inventory control solutions, methodologies & systems developed to manage mentioned each kind of inventories.
Among these inventory types of items in a company, we know spare parts’ items characteristics & demands patterns are absolute the most variant & complicate type – even though their total purchasing values are much lower than raw materials spending. Meanwhile, although some existing independent demand inventory systems used for spare parts inventory management, yet in the real world, for many companies - especially the large scale manufacturing companies, sometimes, these textbook described systems are too theoretical or simplified to be used in solving practical but complicate cases. That’s why most of companies still need to design & develop their own modified systems to meet their unique environment & requirements.
And, 6-Sigma DMAIC methodology would be the perfect solution to do the existing system assessment, measuring, improving and developing. In this thesis, I just applied this strict 6-Sigma DMAIC methodology to make improvement for company’s spare parts inventory management. It is a real case study that described the spare parts management system developing progress by following DMAIC steps in each involved department.
Subjects
零配件庫存管理
Spare Parts Inventory Management
Type
thesis