Over the last dozen years, the bottom-line benefits of Inventory Optimization have proven to rival established activities such as network design, transportation optimization, advanced planning and scheduling, and sales and operations planning.
As their IO efforts and understanding become progressively more mature, companies traverse a common sequence of stages.
An organization must first understand where it sits on the IO maturity curve in order to pursue a journey toward superior competitiveness and outstanding profitability:
This paper provides a quick tour of the steps companies traverse as they progress up the inventory optimization maturity curve to greater inventory savings, working capital availability, and service level excellence.