Inventory pooling is at the root of many celebrated ideas in operations management. Postponement, component commonality, and resource flexibility are some examples. Motivated by our experience in the aftermarket services industry, we propose a model of inventory pooling to meet differentiated...

Operations reversal is a process design principle that involves switching two consecutive stages of the manufacturing process to improve process performance. In this paper we investigate conditions under which operations reversal can be used to reduce the variability---as measured by the...