A TD-ABC model for the computation of the total cost of ownership of spare parts

Abstract

The costs of spare parts represent an important share of the operation and maintenance costs of capital goods. Spare parts may remain in depots and warehouses for long periods of time, and, many of them require logistics activities. There are several life-cycle cost estimation models for capital-intensive production systems however, commonly, they do not consider logistics costs adequately. Thus, to incorporate all these aspects into the computation of the cost of ownership of spare parts, a time-driven activity-based costing model is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, since the dynamics of spare parts management are based on the reliability of the components, the Weibull’s function is integrated into the model. An application is presented considering a logistics distribution center. The presented approach allowed the costs estimation besides the idle capacity estimation, two important information inputs in logistics management. The results show the usefulness of the proposed model. The opportunities for further research and applications are also discussed.