In trying to keep things simple when making delivery promises to customers, companies unintentionally make planning and execution less effective and less efficient.

Inventory policy should use the parameters of your environment along with operations science and math to help you adjust to variability yet arrive at planned performance as expected.

We have seen inventory managers and planners make the mistake of monitoring on-hand to determine how much inventory they should order. This is an incomplete approach and we describe the appropriate measure for good control.