ENGINEERING JOURNAL CHIANG MAI UNIVERSITY

Volume 27, No. 02, Month AUGUST, Year 2020, Pages 1 - 15

Application of association rules for spare parts storage improvement in coffee machine repair shop

Sudaluck Sangwantthu and Wimalin Laosiritaworn

Abstract Download PDF

This research aims to study the inventory management of the coffee machine spare parts in a case study company who conducts total services regarding coffee including planting, distributing coffee products, distributing coffee machines, along with coffee machine maintenance. Nowadays, this kind of business is in a highly competitive and requires fast service, particularly in coffee maintenance service. Currently large amount of spare parts were stocked in order to provide quick response to customers. Spare parts stored in the spare parts storage room are different in shape, size and material. The preliminary study revealed that the storage were unorganized. Space in storage room was allocated without consideration to the spare parts’ associations and requisition. Therefore, it takes a long time to search for the spare parts needed. This study aimed to design a new spare parts allocation in the stock room by using association rule to identify spare parts that are usually used together. Seven rules were found from association rules and were used to design spare parts allocation by putting associated spare parts together in order that the spare parts are easily found. Moreover, the visual control approach was applied in this study in order to help reduce the searching time with the ability to identify positions of the spare parts. The time consumption in searching was reduced from 6.09 minutes to 1.57 minutes after implementation.

Keywords

Association, Rule Inventory, Visual Control

---