DYNA JOURNAL ENGINEERING

Key words:

planificación de compras, planificación de distribución, repuestos, MRO, Defensa, RBS, METRIC, purchasing planning, distribution planning, spare parts, MRO, Defense, RBS, METRIC

Article type:

ARTICULO DE INVESTIGACION / RESEARCH ARTICLE

Section:

RESEARCH ARTICLES

One of the goals of the Spanish Army (SA) Operations Department is to ensure the operational availability of its numerous fleets of weapons' systems. Specially in times of economic crisis, with severe budget cuts, achieving this goal becomes a challenge for the logistic engineering, which has to look for efficiency by implementing innovative projects to improve its supply chain.
In the maintenance processes, the purchasing and distribution planning of spare-parts are considered the most relevant for the SA due to its influence in the operational availability and the enormous economical resources needed. Among other factors, the pattern of the spare parts demand, very irregular, erratic and with a large number of null periods, turns out that finding a good planning method is not a simple task.
This article analyzes the implementation of the adapted RBS method ("Reliability based Sparing") which provides SA a useful solution to the above purpose, diverting the attention from the demand of each single spare part to the whole system and the available credit. The results after the first year of operation are presented.