BNET Business Dictionary
Business Definition for: Inventory
- the total of an organization's commercial assets
- the stock of finished goods, raw materials, and work in progress held by a company
Wiktionary Definition for: Inventory
- the stock of an item on hand at a particular location or buisiness
- Ex: ''Due to an undersized inventory at the Boston outlet, customers had to travel to Providence to find the item.''
- a detailed list of all of the items on hand
- Ex: ''The inventory included several items that one wouldn't normally think to find at a cheese shop.''
- the process of producing or updating such a list
- Ex: ''This month's inventory took nearly three days.''
- to take stock of the resources or items on hand; to produce an inventory
- Ex: ''The main job of the night shift was to inventory the store, and restock when necessary.''
Additional Resources
- Chip inventory decreasing, but market turnaround unlikely in 2009, says Gartner
- Chip inventory stockpiles have been shed, according to Gartner, noting that its Dataquest Semiconductor Inventory DASI Index continued to fall in the third quarter of 2009. However, a market turnaround is unlikely to take place in 2009, said the research firm. Gartner said its DASI Index had moved to just...
- News items 2009-10-06
- Turning Inventory Into Profits
- The article says that in years past, the status of inventory levels was usually known only at the beginning of the first shift-and only if there had been a batch update the previous night. Wireless can improve a company's distribution system and allow for efficient growth capacity for expansion. It...
- White papers 2002-05-01
- Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization
- The optimal deployment of inventory is a vital business function for an enterprise. As Forrester Research pointed out in a recent report, the ability to increase inventory turns is a key differentiator between highly successful and more poorly performing companies. Managing inventory in a multi-echelon network vs. a single-echelon network...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Dynamic Inventory Management With Learning About The Demand Distribution
- A well-known result in the Bayesian inventory management literature is: if lost sales are not observed, the Bayesian optimal inventory level is larger than the myopic inventory level. It has been proven under the assumption that inventory is perishable, so the myopic inventory level is equal to the Bayesian optimal...
- White papers 2006-01-30
- Why is Inventory turnover important?
- This article is about how to calculate Inventory Turnover . It also includes information, how companies should calculate inventory turnover separately for every product line in every warehouse. This will allow them to identify situations in which their inventory is not providing an adequate return on their investment. To improve...
- White papers 1997-01-01
- Analyzing Inventory Adjustments
- The company has begun a program to achieve effective inventory management. As part of the program, they are cycle counting products and entering inventory adjustments when they find discrepancies between the quantity of a product in their warehouse and the perpetual inventory maintained by their computer system. Though the company...
- White papers 2000-01-01
- Pooled Versus Reserved Inventory In A Two-Echelon Supply Chain
- We consider a two-echelon supply chain with two retailers and one supplier. The retailers are supplied by the supplier who makes all the decisions and bears all the inventory risk. Throughout this paper, we consider two different inventory systems: a reserved inventory system and a pooled inventory system. With the...
- White papers 2006-05-25
- A Perceptions Framework For Categorizing Inventory Policies In Single-Stage Inventory Systems
- In this paper we propose a perceptions framework for categorizing a range of inventory policies, including optimal inventory policies, that can be employed in a single-stage supply chain. We take the existence of a wide range of inventory policies, including what we would term optimal and suboptimal policies, as given...
- White papers 2007-06-01
- LIFO vs FIFO Inventory Accounting at Home Depot
- Home Depot, Inc. announced a key change in accounting principals in its third quarter filing with the SEC. After adopting a new enterprise resource planning system, otherwise known in the wholesale-retail world as an “ERP†system, Home Depot is now keeping track of inventory values in its Canada retail operations...
- Blog posts 2008-12-27
- Seasonality and Promotions as they Impact Inventory Management
- Products that exhibit seasonality can, if not handled properly, have a major adverse impact on inventory management and planning. Unless the forecast for these products recognizes and deals with the seasonality, the forecast will lag demand as the product enters its strong selling season, and it will just as seriously...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Does Higher Inventory = Lower Customer Service?
- Every sales person's worst nightmare is the dreaded inventory reduction program. Intuitive reasoning can lead them to believe that lower inventory will result in bare shelves and unhappy customers. It just seems logical! Most inventory text books validate the less inventory fear. The overall message is simple. The companies who...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Can you Profit form Improved Inventory Control?
- Inventory is analogous to money on the shelf. In reality, however, inventory exists to improve your level of service. The right amount of the right part numbers will provide you with what you need when you need it, without enormous stress on your operating capital. There are two methods of...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Ten Ways to Reduce Inventory, While Maintaining or Improving Service
- Inventory is a significant and visible asset in most companies - often the largest. Executives and shareholders have focused on inventory levels for years, but it has frequently been reduced arbitrarily, without a full understanding of supply chain implications. This paper discusses approaches to sustainable, and appropriate, inventory reduction. The...
- White papers 2000-07-01
- Incorporating Price And Inventory Endogeneity In Firm-Level Sales Forecasting
- As numerous papers have argued, sales, inventory, and gross margin for a retailer are interrelated. A simultaneous equation model is constructed to establish these interrelationships at a firm level. Using publicly available financial data the six causal effects among sales, inventory, and gross margin are estimated. The results show that...
- White papers 2007-01-09
- A.M. Castle: Reinventing Inventory?
- Saj Karsan submits: A.M. Castle (NYSE: CAS) is a metals and plastics distribution company out of Illinois. As of its latest quarterly report, it had inventory of $248 million. The inventory is also stated to have a replacement cost of $423 million. So how can it be that the...
- External links 2008-08-26
- Inventory Strategies Yield Uneven Results
- Collaborative inventory-management strategies can reduce inventory levels throughout a value chain where inventory management techniques are working; it is a situation where information is replacing inventory. The most commonly used inventory- management practices -- deployed with either suppliers or customers -- are just-in-time delivery, vendor-managed inventories, and real-time inventory tracking....
- White papers 2000-03-20
- Optimized Inventory Management
- Inventory service, like other service components, retains customers when it performs well. But it "sends" customers to competitors when it doesn't. In this way inventory service goes beyond just retention. It captures competitors' customers when the company is quizzed due to those competitors' own poor inventory service. Superior inventory service...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Negative Inventory: What You Don't Know May Make Things Worse
- From the executive summary: ‘People often get excited over negative inventory because the concept seems very ridiculous. Surprisingly, negative inventory is a very common occurrence and may even be a normal part of some processes. Though, negative inventory balances do reflect some type of problem, it should not be assumed...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- Retail Inventory Management When Records Are Inaccurate
- Inventory record inaccuracy is a significant problem for retailers using automated Inventory Management systems. While investments in preventative and corrective measures can be effective remedies, gains can also be achieved through inventory management tools that account for record errors. This paper considers intelligent Inventory Management tools that account for record...
- White papers 2005-11-10
- i2 Inventory Management Services
- i2 Inventory Management Services help companies identify opportunities for improving service levels while reducing costs through optimization of supply chain configuration, inventory positioning, deployment strategies, execution, and monitoring. Service capabilities as well as inventory and distribution costs are largely determined by how a company's supply and distribution network is configured...
- White papers 2005-02-01
