The Covid19 pandemic has placed unusual stress on public transit agencies. This stress forces agencies to look again at their spare parts planning processes, which is a key driver up ensuring uptime and balancing service parts inventory costs.

This blog focuses on bus systems and their practices for spare parts management and planning. However, there are lessons here for other types of public transit, including rail and light rail.

Back in 1995, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Research Council published a report that still has relevance. System-Specific Spare Bus Ratios: A Synthesis of Transit Practice stated

The purpose of this study was to document and examine the critical site-specific variables that affect the number of spare vehicles that bus systems need to maintain maximum service requirements. … Although transit managers generally acknowledged that right-sizing the fleet actually improves operations and lowers cost, many reported difficulties in achieving and consistently maintaining a 20 percent spare ratio as recommended by FTA… The respondents to the survey advocated that more emphasis be placed on developing improved and innovative bus maintenance techniques, which would assist them in minimizing downtime and improving vehicle availability, ultimately leading to reduced spare vehicles and labor and material costs.

Grossly simplified guidelines like “keep 20% spare buses” are easy to understand and measure but grossly mask more detailed tactics that can provide more tailored policies that better steward taxpayer dollars spent on spare parts while ensuring the highest levels of availability. If operational reliability can be improved for each bus, then fewer spares are needed.

One way to keep each bus up and running more often is to improve the management of inventories of spare parts – specifically by forecasting service parts usage and the required replenishment policies more accurately. Here is where modern supply chain management can make a significant contribution. The TRB noted this in their report:

Many agencies have been successful in limiting reliance on excess spare vehicles. Those transit officials agree that several factors and initiatives have led to their success and are critical to the success of any program [including] … Effective use of advanced technology to manage critical maintenance functions, including the orderly and timely replacement of parts… Failure to have available service parts and other components when they are needed will adversely affect any maintenance program.

As long as managers are cognizant of the issues and vigilant about what tools are available to them, the probability of buses [being] ‘out for no stock’ will greatly diminish.”

Effective spare parts inventory management requires a balance between “having enough” and “having too much.” What modern service parts planning software can do is make visible the tradeoff between these two goals so that transit managers can make fact-based decisions about spare parts inventories.

There are enough complications in finding the right balance to require moving beyond simple rules of thumb such as “keep ten days’ worth of demand on hand” or “reorder when you are down to five units in stock.” Factors that drive these decisions include both the average demand for a part, the volatility of that demand, the average replenishment lead time (which can be a problem when the part arrives by slow boat from Germany), the variability in lead time, and several cost factors: holding costs, ordering costs, and shortage costs (e.g., lost fares, loss of public goodwill).

Innovative supply chain analytics and spare parts planning software uses advanced probabilistic forecasting and stochastic optimization methods to manage these complexities and provide greater parts availability at lower cost. For instance, Minnesota’s Metro Transit documented a 4x increase in return on investment in the first six months of implementing a new system. To read more about how public transit agencies are exploiting innovative supply chain analytics, see:

• Optimizing Parts Management at BC Transit
• Smart Software and Metro Transit
• Smart Software Helps Metro-North Railroad Keep the Trains Running On-Time

You may remember the story of Goldilocks from your long-ago youth. Sometimes the porridge was too hot, sometimes it was too cold, but just once it was just right. Now that we are adults, we can translate that fairy tale into a professional principle for inventory planning: There can be too little or too much inventory, and there is some Goldilocks level that is “just right.” This blog is about finding that sweet spot.

To illustrate our supply chain fable, consider this example. Imagine that you sell service parts to keep your customers systems up and running. You offer a particular service part that costs you $100 to make but sells for a 20% markup. You can make $20 on each unit you sell, but you don’t get to keep the whole $20 because of the inventory operating costs you bear to be able to sell the part. There are holding costs to keep the part in good repair while in stock and ordering costs to replenish units you sell. Finally, sometimes you lose revenue from lost sales due to stockouts.  

These operating costs can be directly related to the way you manage the part in inventory. For our example, assume you use a (Q,R) inventory policy, where Q is the replenishment order quantity and R is the reorder point. Assume further that the reason you are not making $30 per unit is that you have competitors, and customers will get the part from them if they can’t get it from you.

Both your revenue and your costs depend in complex ways on your choices for Q and R. These will determine how much you order, when and therefore how often you order, how often you stock out and therefore how many sales you lose, and how much cash you tie up in inventory. It is impossible to cost out these relationships by guesswork, but modern software can make the relationships visible and calculate the dollar figures you need to guide your choice of values for Q and R. It does this by running detailed, fact-based, probabilistic simulations that predict costs and performance by averaging over a large number of realistic demand scenarios.  

With these results in hand, you can work out the margin associated with (Q,R) values using the simple formula

Margin = (Demand – Lost Sales) x Profit per unit sold – Ordering Costs – Holding Costs.

In this formula, Lost Sales, Ordering Costs and Holding Costs are dependent on reorder point R and order quantity Q.

Figure 1 shows the result of simulations that fixed Q at 25 units and varied R from 10 to 30 in steps of 5. While the curve is rather flat on top, you would make the most money by keeping on-hand inventory around 25 units (which corresponds to setting R = 20). More inventory, despite a higher service level and fewer lost sales, would make a little less money (and ties up a lot more cash), and less inventory would make a lot less.

Figure 1: Showing that there can be too little or too much inventory on hand

Without relying on the inventory simulation software, we would not be able to discover

• a) that it is possible to carry too little and too much inventory
• b) what the best level of inventory is
• c) how to get there by proper choices of reorder point R and order quantity Q.

Without an explicit understanding of the above, companies will make daily inventory decisions relying on gut feel and averaging based rule of thumb methods. The tradeoffs described here are not exposed and the resulting mix of inventory yields a far lower return forfeiting hundreds of thousands to millions per year in lost profits.  So be like Goldilocks.  With the right systems and software tools, you too can get it just right!