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Introduction
Inventory serves as a useful purpose in the supply chain. Many supply chain managers say firms can help decrease the need for inventory by carefully managing factors that cause inventory levels to increase. Inventory can be defined as the result of imbalance between supply and demand. The term inventory drivers comes from the consequences of certain supply or demand characteristics, such as: product desirability, responsiveness, information, collaboration, and visibility (St. John, 2008). The four common inventory drivers are: 1) demand/ capacity mismatches; smoothing inventories 2) demand/ process volume mismatches; cycle stocks 3) demand/supply uncertainty; safety stocks and 4) demand/supply chain lead time mismatches; anticipation inventories (Bozarth, 2011).
Determining Inventory Levels Inventory decisions are normally determined by five key business drivers: consumer demand, lead time variability, pack mix, merchandising requirements, and service levels. However, with every decision there is always an area for error. Forecasting consumer demand involves factoring in lead time, lead time variability, and package size constraints. The best way to manage customer demand is to run a sales and operating plan across merchandise, supply chain, and store operations to tweak forecasts and reduce forecast errors. The key is to do a monthly review of forecasts for items with a stable demand, and for items with unstable demand and promoted categories they need a more frequent review. Overall, additional inventory is needed to cover the demand that is in excess of the forecasted quantity (Chandra, 2008). Furthermore, lead time variability is the key driver of work in process inventory. Most times retailers use management programs to sort through suppliers that have long lead times or find more reliable delivery channels. These programs start with internal

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