Second Prize at POM Conference for Inventory Management Article

At the Society for Production and Operations Management’s annual conference, an article by <link people morteza-pourakbar>Morteza Pourakbar, <link people rommert-dekker>Rommert Dekker and Hans Frenk came in second place for the Wickham Skinner Award. This mark of recognition is awarded to the best articles published each year in the Production and Operations Management Journal, a highly regarded journal.

‘We were very pleasantly surprised to receive this award,’ according to Dekker. The award-winning article is entitled ‘End-of-Life Inventory Decisions for Consumer Electronics Service Parts.’ It deals with problematic decisions concerning final production runs for products with service guarantees. How do you determine the appropriate amount of parts to produce during a final production run, so as to be able to meet the service request demands that can come in up to five years later? Pourakbar, Dekker and Frenk propose a new model that advises firms faced with this type of question.

Using Martingale Theory, the authors develop an exact method for dealing with the production problems posed by service guarantees. Martingale models in Probability Theory describe situations in which knowledge of past events does not help predict future outcomes. The new method developed in this paper is the theoretical answer to a practical problem first identified by Econometrics graduate and current employee of Philips Consumer Electronics, Thomas Sigar. It will assist firms in more accurate decision-making for final production runs, allowing them to reduce costly unnecessary inventory and avoid shortcomings in dealing with service requests.

All three authors are current or previous ERIM members. Dr Morteza Pourakbar is an Associate Member who earned his PhD in 2011 for <link doctoral-programme phd-in-management phd-projects detail>research that addressed similar issues as the award-winning paper. Rommert Dekker is a full professor of Econometrics and a Fellow. Before being appointed as an associate professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul in 2009, Hans Frenk worked at Erasmus University and was a Member of ERIM.