The particular characteristics of spare parts have prompted several authors to provide substantial results for effective spare parts supply chain management. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to present the significant contributions that researchers have proposed, over time, for the spare parts supply chain management. The literature has shown that the particular characteristics of spare parts have a significant impact on inventory performance and customer demand fulfillment. For this reason, most of the contributions were focused on spare parts classification methods, forecasting methods and inventory optimization. The focus of researchers on some areas of spare parts management allowed us to identify some promising perspectives that were not developed in the literature, such as the development of performance measurement frameworks for the spare parts supply chain and the measurement of organizational maturity.

This paper provides a categorization approach that encompasses the required categories and subcategories for the performance measurement of automotive spare parts supply chain, with a focus on independent distributor belonging to the independent channel. In fact, the particular characteristics of spare parts have led to the emergence of many scientific contributions related to inventory management and demand forecasting methods. However, little research has focused on the measurement of the spare parts supply chain performance despite its big importance. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap in the literature, in particular for the automotive aftermarket, by proposing a framework that will lead to the measurement of the overall automotive spare parts supply chain performance.