At the Society for Production and Operations Management’s annual conference in Denver (USA), Morteza Pourakbar, Hans Frenk and Rommert Dekker got 2nd prize in the “Best Paper in the Production Operations Management Journal in 2012” category (known as the Wickham Skinner Award) for their article entitled “End-of-Life inventory decisions for consumer electronics service parts”.
Morteza Pourakbar, who received his PhD from Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) in 2011, now works as a tenure tracker at Rotterdam School of Management. Hans Frenk, a former student at Erasmus School of Economics, works at Sabanci University in Istanbul, and Rommert Dekker is Professor of Operational Research, Quantitative Logistics and IT at Erasmus School of Economics.
The article proposes a new model to provide recommendations on how many extra parts need to be manufactured after production stops to meet service requests over a service period that can last up to 5 years. This practical issue was identified and picked up by Thomas Sigar, a former Econometrics & Operational Research student who now works for Philips Consumer Electronics. What makes the problem so difficult is that a final production run must be able to satisfy demand for several years. Sometimes, it can be better to offer customers an alternative system in the long run.
The article includes a new, exact methodology for this problem, based on martingale theory, which up to now has rarely been used in Operations Management. The POM Journal is one of the P* (STAR) Journals in the ERIM Journal List.