Spare Parts and Maintenance Optimization in a Mobile Telephone Company

Telecommunication companies depend on high availability of equipment to maintain service quality. In cellular communications electronic cards maintenance is basically reduced to exchanging parts as they fail. These parts are geographically dispersed in unmanned locations. Spares and maintenance policies are thus interrelated and tend to follow multiechelon configurations, following the architecture of the physical network. We describe the optimization of spare parts and maintenance policies performed by the Venezuelan mobile phone operator Movilnet. Both system issues (reduction of SKU, classification of items, network practices, and data integrity) and modeling issues, centered on the adaptation of the METRIC model to the simultaneous optimization of spare parts and personnel resources, are discussed. The systematic application of these resulted in important reductions in the purchasing of spare parts, without quality deterioration.