La planificación de repuestos en el Ejército de Tierra. Implantación del método disponibilidad basada en la escasez (RBS)

Abstract

One of the goals of the Ejército de Tierra (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. Within 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, extremely 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. Satisfactory results after the first year of operation are presented