Glossary of Unique Terms

Depot Repair: An organization in your supply chain that repairs or refurbishes products and parts.

Emergency stocking locations (ESL): An organization from which inventories for a group of technicians are replenished.

Inline Forecasting: Generating forecasts within SRP as contrasted with using demand planning or ERP system to generate forecasts.

Operational Data Store (ODS): Collected data is the data from the source ERP or legacy applications. Each plan run uses the ODS or collected data and then creates a plan-specific copy for most of the data.

Planning Data Store (PDS): The data against each plan.

Repair Lead Time

The time needed to repair a defective part. This is the total of:

Lead time to transfer defectives for repair
Lead time to repair at the repair organization
Lead time to transfer and receive usable parts from the repair organization

Repair Supplier: A third-party supplier in your supply base that provides repair and refurbishment-related services.

Repaired, Refurbished, and Remanufactured Items

Though these terms are almost interchangeable, this document assumes the following definitions for repaired, refurbished, and remanufactured items in the context of a manufacturing organization. For a purely service-centric organization, these three terms share the same definition, which is: "The process of repairing and reusing spares or products to satisfy demand." All of these methods can include upgrades or downgrades of a product or part.

Repair: An item received from a customer or as part of the defective returns from the field is processed, using additional resources and parts, to make the item functional and conform to original (or repaired) specifications. The product or part may be under warranty. Repaired parts are returned to the originating customer or field source.
Refurbish: An item received either from a customer as an exchange item (where the defective item is exchanged for a good item) or other collection method such as defective and end-of-life returns, is processed, using additional processes and parts to conform to original product specifications. Such products or parts are then sold through normal distribution channel either as new products or refurbished products.
Remanufacture: This mass refurbishment activity implies a higher value-add to repaired parts and products that are sold through the normal distribution channels, mostly as new products.

Returns Forecast: A forecast of anticipated returns from the customer base, including end customers, distributors, and retailers for repair as well as end-of-life returns and collections.

Returns Forecast Time Fence: An item attribute that defines a rolling period of time from the present to a point in the future, such as ten days. This attribute controls planning calculations so that the system considers returns forecast quantities for dates that are beyond this time fence, but only actual RMA returns within this time fence.

Returns Order Type: When a forecast scenario is entered to a service plan as a supply schedule, the resulting supply is defined as Returns. The supply type of returns is available in the planner’s workbench.

Reverse Logistics: The broad definition of reverse logistics covers the management, planning, and execution of returns into an organization, and the processes of repair (refurbishment, or remanufacture), warranty, and reuse or scrapping the material.