TABLE OF CONTENTS nothing is as impractical as a good theory of inventory. I willexplain why what has been truly good inventory research for more than 35 years has not done much toadvance the practice of industrial inventory control.
Harvey M. Wagner [9]
To be able to design effective planning approaches for unique enterprises and supply chains,we need to understand a significant fraction of the vast body of operations planning techniquesthat has been created over the last century. We are fortunate to be the beneficiaries of a greatdeal of thoughtful work by practitioners and academics and also of the software that has beendeveloped and packaged.
While we need to build the best planning solution for our unique problems, we are not likelyto create entirely new ways to plan product flow we are not smart enough to do that, we do nothave enough time to do that, and we probably cannot afford to create a custom set of tools fromscratch to implement a completely novel approach. But by being more educated about the diversity oftechniques, we are less likely to naively espouse the first approach we were ever taught and morelikely to assemble an effective approach that draws from multiple sources.
We will base our work primarily on these rich traditions:
On the early operations models that led to statistically based techniques for inventorycontrol
On the applied techniques that gave us MRP II, distribution resource planning, the Theory ofConstraints, just in time, and Lean
On the academic tradition that has given us...
