Purpose – As the complexity of the multi-component products increases the quality of these products becomes increasingly difficult to control throughout the supply chain. The first step to manufacturing a quality product is to ensure that the product components from suppliers meet...

We develop a delay time model (DTM) to determine the optimal maintenance policy under a novel assumption: postponed replacement. Delay time is defined as the time lapse from the occurrence of a defect up until failure. Inspections can be performed to monitor the system state at non-negligible...