Trends in inventory management

Inventory management is one of the success stories of recent years and it is changing rapidly in response to international competition and new technology. This paper examines some of these developments. Inventory is a major investment in most companies. It strongly influences the internal flexibility of a company, e.g. by allowing production levels to change easily and by providing good delivery performance to customers. Yet inventory ties up working capital and space and it can suffer from obsolescence, deterioration and shrinkage. It can also add to administrative complexity. In recent years attention in manufacturing industry has concentrated on an ‘inventory is waste’ philosophy using JIT production, usually accompanied by visible ‘pull’ or consumer demand driven systems. The approach is also very effective in supermarket retailing and, at its best, provides very high stock turn and high profits to the company at the same time as providing good service and fresh items to customers at low cost. Current changes in inventory management consider the total logistics chain under the term logistics management, place a greater emphasis on purchasing rather than producing in-house and use more international sourcing. Changes to recording methods include the use of different methods of information collection and processing, e.g. bar coding in retailing and manufacture and electronic exchange of information. Control methods are more computer based and are becoming part of increasingly integrated systems. There are some obvious problems still to be solved. Procedures are needed to bring one-off analyses of inventory to become part of routine systems, work needs to be done to produce performance measures which are consistent between different levels of the organisation and the modelling of dynamic performance needs to become part of the design of the present production-inventory systems. More fundamentally, it is still not known how to classify companies, let alone how to determine the best approach to inventory planning and control for a particular kind of company.