Problems Associated With Inventory Management

Evaluate the role their inventory plays in the company’s performance, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

Although inventory plays a major role in the supply chain, there are also some inconveniences. Inventory is very costly and uses space that could be used in a more profitable way.

Inventory management is part of the warehouse management and both of them are part of a bigger entity which is the supply chain. The objective of supply chain is to minimize annual system wide costs and maximizing the service level. To reach the goal or objective of supply chain, Inventory and warehouse management have the following objectives that will help increase return on inventory (ROI) and return on assets (ROA):

The purpose for this paper is to identify two principles of inventory management. An explanation on how inventory management affects a businesses cash conversion cycle and cost of goods will be covered. Next, supply chain components as they relate to the week four simulations will be discussed. Lastly, an explanation of the bottleneck theory will be given along with two solutions on how to resolve the bottleneck issue.

In the interview, Celine mentions that the company is lacking inventory control. There is no regular auditing in place to keep track of stocks. This practice is unacceptable. I recommend that the manager makes sure inventory is regularly checked. Businesses spend a great deal of time with tracking inventory. Even for a small company like AC Medical Supplies and Equipment there is a need for inventory control. Inventory management is considered a best practice in the business world. When a company does not audit its inventory, it is taking a gamble on unwanted risk. Some companies have experienced financial losses in the result of failed inventory controls.

Managing inventory, the order process, is a difficult task and if not handled properly leads to high inventory costs. It has always been tricky to manage and predict the perfect amount of inventory. Hence the most commonly known question arises, ‘Is Inventory Evil?’ Too much inventory will increase the inventory holding cost while too little can result in a shortage. To avoid such impasse, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is used. Vendor managed inventory is defined as the technique in which the vendor/supplier takes the responsibility of managing or optimizing the inventory of the distributor. This enables a mutually advantageous relationship in which both sides can manage the flow and availability of goods with

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as  evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its web site  without editorial or

Inventory management systems are very useful when applying them in the correct manner. As a human resource specialist working for the US Army, our inventory management systems are extremely important as the defense of our nation somewhat rests on how we best allocate the human resources to the places that need them within the system.

Today’s supply chains are more complex than ever due to globalization and its effects, especially on manufacturing activities. Therefore, understanding and managing complexity in supply chains are very popular topic nowadays. Measures for complexity in supply chains contribute to their manageability and controllability. In a dynamic environment such as the supply chain, even basic supplier-customer systems with structurally simple information and material flow formations have a tendency to exhibit operational complexity. The operational complexity of a system is primarily characterized by the uncertainty of the dynamic system. The need to manage inventories to ensure that customers receive the right products at the right time is a central feature of operation of many firms. Successful inventory management with the main purpose of keeping safety stocks as low as possible while satisfying demand has become increasingly more difficult as supply chains are becoming more complex. This paper undertakes a problem on calculating the operational complexity of a supply chain by using entropy as a tool. The investigation for

Quality management is a key ingredient for competitive success. Firms strive for sustainable relative quality advantage to differentiate themselves from their competition (Talha, 2004). Intel’s quality management is the cornerstone of competitive advantage. Intel uses quality management practices to lead to superior quality outcomes and increased quality performance that appear to be founded from Deming’s 14 points philosophy.

“Inventory management is a core operations management activity” (Stevenson, 2016). The Inventory Management and Control needs to be designed to meet the demand of the marketplace and still be able to support the company, and any plans to expand, etc. The structure of inventories is important for the supply chain in order to have an effective material flow and order fulfillment. In the case for Harvey Industries, the inventory control system would prompt the stockroom supervisor, purchasing and manufacturing manager to place orders for goods to be replenished, whenever one of them finds the materials have been depleted. Often, prompting trade-offs in inventory and poor inventory management results in a lower productivity value in operations, decreasing customer satisfaction resulting in an increase in operating costs.

Inventory management can be difficult in today's economy where sales can fluctuate and seasonal sales come and go. Inventory management can present barriers to success with unavailable or inaccurate data, inability to integrate total cost measures, inability to measure product enhancements or new products, no agreement on when to measure or record, and not enough organizational commitment (Smeltzer, 2003). Inventory technology models can present problems with Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) calculations, inaccurate inputs, and conflict with corporate strategies and goals (Piasecki, 2012). Without proper management, the organization could end up with excessive underselling stock and shortages of selling stock.

The term supply chain defines the combined efforts of different organization in reaching of a product to the end user. The concept of Supply Chain Management lies in the idea of maximizing the customer value and attain competitive advantage. The SCM incorporates the development and capacity of raw materials, work-in-procedure stock, and completed products from the beginning point to processing to the final customer.

Inventory analysis is done at regular intervals to support decision making. Inventory analysis basically helps inventory manager to take necessary steps to protect their valuable items. There are many analysis techniques that are used but some of the important techniques are mentioned here.

In this work, a two warehouse inventory system has been investigated by considering advance payment and partial backlogging with interval valued inventory cost. In this model, the corresponding optimization problem with interval objective has been formulated and solved with the help of different variants of particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique and interval order relations. Due to interval valued inventory cost, the different variants of PSO algorithm have been developed by using interval arithmetic and interval order relations. Then the obtained best found solutions (which is either optimal or nearer to optimal) from different variants of PSO have been compared and it is observed that all the variants of PSO have produced the