An empirical analysis of managerial approaches to the role of inventories

The paper aims to make the first step to the empirical investigation of managers' perception of the role of inventories in today's business. In a previous paper [Chikn, A., 2004. The new role of inventories in business: real world changes and research consequences. Paper presented at the 13th International Symposium on Inventories. International Journal of Production Economics, to appear] I have stated that there has been a gradual paradigm shift in inventory management in the last decades, due to the extensive changes in the economic and business environment. The main point is that the new paradigm assumes a far more complex role of inventories than in the traditional approach, leading to a strategic role of inventories in a triple role: as contributors to value creation, as means of flexibility and means of control. The new paradigm leads to new needs for research orientation and methodology. The train of thoughts in the earlier conceptual paper is to be checked in practical business environment. This paper reports on a survey of 51 Hungarian companies and explores their view on inventories. The results obtained are reassuring and promising but further research is necessary.