PhD defence of Morteza Pourakbar on Tuesday 29 November 2011

On Tuesday 29 November 2011 Morteza Pourakbar will defend his PhD thesis entitled 'End-of-Life Inventory Decisions of Service Parts'. Supervisor is Professor Rommert Dekker.

Time and location

The PhD defence will take place at the Arminius kerk (church) and will start at 9.30 hrs. For more information please see: http://www.eur.nl/ese/english/news/detail/article/31068/.

About the PhD thesis

With the spurt of technology and innovation the life cycles of products have become shorter and products enter their final phases more quickly than before. Consequently, service parts also enter their end-of-life phases earlier. Final phase of a typical service part starts as soon as the part production is ceased and ends when the last service or warranty contract expires. However, a firm obligation to satisfy demands for spare parts during service periods, which normally goes beyond the termination time of part production, drives inventory managers to plan for service parts acquisition before the start of the end-of-life phase. One popular tactic in practice is placing a final order.  The prime challenge of a firm while deciding a final order quantity is to minimize inventory-carrying costs together with the risk of obsolescence at the end of the planning period.

In this study, end-of-life inventory decisions for an array of products including both consumer electronics and capital-intensive products are investigated. For consumer electronics we show that considering an alternative service policy, such as swapping the defective product with a new one, besides a regular repair policy improves cost efficiency. 

Moreover, for capital-intensive products we study systems with phase-out returns and systems with customer differentiation in the end-of-life phase. Our analysis reveals that taming the uncertainty associated with phase-out arrivals engenders a remarkable efficiency improvement. Moreover, including rationing decisions in the end-of-life phase enhances the performance of the system by a significant reduction in cost and risk of obsolescence.

About Morteza Pourakbar

Morteza Pourakbar received his BSc degree in industrial engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2002 and his Master's degree in Industrial Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology in 2005 both in Tehran, Iran. He started his PhD program at Erasmus School of Economics in November 2006.

His main research interests are inventory management, closed loop supply chains, sustainable operations management and risk management in global supply chains. His research has been presented in various international conferences including INFORMS 2007-10 and POMS 2011. Moreover, his research papers have been published or accepted in some leading journals including Production and Operations Management.

See for more information:

For more information about this ceremony, please contact the Press Office of Erasmus University Rotterdam phone +31 10 408 1216, email press@remove-this.eur.nl.