Dollar Cost Banding: A New Algorithm for Computing Inventory Levels for Army Supply Support Activities

When Army equipment fails, its timely repair depends critically on the availability of needed spare parts. This monograph describes the development and implementation of dollar cost banding (DCB), a new algorithm for computing spare parts inventories maintained by Army supply support activities (SSAs). DCB has been used to expand the breadth of deployable inventories, producing immediate and significant gains in performance at little or no additional inventory cost and without sacrificing mobility.