ventory planning Chapter 12: Inventory planning and...
Study guide |
This chapter is relatively unusual in so much as it takes more of a quantitative approach to its topic. While not avoiding quantitative models where they are appropriate, the general approach of this book is to deal with operations management from a ‘general management’ point of view. Here we include some quantitative models of how inventory is managed mainly to demonstrate that some parts of the inventory decision can be quantified. In practice, most of these decision models will be embedded within an operation’s routine stock control computer system. However, whilst working through them remember that it is the underlying principles behind the models which are more important than the mathematics on which the models are based.Your learning objectivesThis is what you should be able to do after reading Chapter 12 and working through this study guide. * Understand what is meant by an inventory and why they exist. * Identify some of the advantages and disadvantages of keeping inventory in an operation. * Understand the basic principles behind the quantitative approaches to deciding how much inventory to keep. * Be able to describe the limitations of traditional quantitative models of inventory decision making. * Identify the two main approaches to managing inventory on an on-going basis.What do we mean by inventory?The chapter discusses inventory (we use the word interchangeably with the word ‘stock’) predominantly as accumulations of transformed input resource. In fact, usually as accumulations of material, parts or products. It does however mention the broader use of the word inventory or stock to denote the organisation’s ‘stock’ of people, machines, and other assets. You often hear economists talking of a stock of resources in this way. From here on however we use the word exclusively