Just‐in‐time manufacturing is a Western adaptation of an influential Japanese idea: the existence of inventory is a way of covering up inefficiencies of procurement, production and marketing. JIT in a western context will often be an extension of the advanced manufacturing techniques...

Small businesses are vital for a nation's economic well being. In recent years, the rate of the failure of small businesses has been on the rise. These failures have been attributed to a number of factors, including a lack of implementation of scientific management concepts in their operations....

Group technology has become an important and viable approach to manufacturing systems, and provides significant benefits in inventory management, production process flow, throughput efficiency, tooling, and purchasing. It focuses on classification systems as the main approach, as opposed to...

Given a limited set of assumptions, a model is developed that shows how the economic advantage of Materials Requirements Planning over Order Point‐Order Quantity Technique, varies with a range of industrial conditions. Insights are gained by varying one parameter of the model at a time.

Inventory service levels are a concern of every inventory system. Poor service levels may result in loss of customers and sales, whereas excessive service levels result in loss of money due to large inventories. Although inventory service levels have been discussed widely in the professional...

Five hundred financial executives from North American companies were surveyed by means of a mailed questionnaire to gain a view from outside the operations functions of the basis on which aggregate inventory decisions are taken. The response indicated that more functions than might have been...

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of a co‐ordinated control inventory model, when it is applied to a practical situation. A comparison is made between the costs incurred when a co‐ordinated replenishment policy is used with that of an independent control strategy....

Optimal decision rules are presented for determining both the best stock‐up level and the best time to receive an order in a fixed order‐interval inventory system under certainty. In developing such rules, an important, but heretofore neglected, factor is taken explicitly into account,...

This article examines inventory control problems in developing countries using the results of a field study conducted in the industrial sector of a developing country. It is shown that ineffective inventory control is a major problem faced by industries in developing countries and that even the...

The implementation of the Japanese inventory control system, Kanban, in a production line, reduces Work‐in‐Process (WIP) inventory without affecting production or sales, though there is a point at which the reverse becomes true. The hypothesis that Kanban policy would reduce total WIP...