Moving beyond trade-offs

Logisticians are trained to identify trade-offs and to devise compromising solutions which produce the lowest total costs. For example, the economic batch size is a compromise between setup costs and inventory carrying costs. Presents a problem-analysis technique which helps the analyst to eliminate the problem so that no compromise is necessary. For example, instead of balancing inventory-carrying costs and setup costs a solution which produces both lower setup costs and lower inventory-carrying costs would be sought. Discusses a description of the techniques and several examples of its application to logistical problems.