Analysis of Department of Defense Organic Depot Maintenance Capacity Managementand Facility Utilization Factors

摘要

This study investigated the effects of mandated depot capacity utilization rateson throughput, inventory, and operating expense. The measures of merit analyzed were work in process inventories, leadtime, and throughput. Since the services do not use a common computer system to track/compute capacity data, a computer simulation provided the data used to meet the research objectives. The simulation modeled a serially interdependent system subject to statistical fluctuations. Variability in the system was reduced by reducing the spread around the processing time mean. Buffer inventories were placed in front of each process to protect the process from variability. Constrained systems were buffered and the results analyzed. It was concluded that utilization rates do not reflect process effectiveness nor do they provide information on the level of customer satisfaction achieved. Additionally, this study resulted in the recommendation that DOD policy address effectiveness, not utilization and that performance measures based on throughput, inventory, and operating expense be used to evaluate process effectiveness.