From the course: Inventory Management Foundations
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Manage service inventory
From the course: Inventory Management Foundations
Manage service inventory
- When most people think of inventory, they think of a physical product. Services have inventory also, but it's quite different from factory inventory. It's a common belief that service businesses cannot store inventory. A restaurant, for example, would view empty tables as inventory. In a sense, that's part of their finished product, a table and wait staff ready to serve a customer. Empty tables at lunchtime cannot be stored and used as extra capacity during the dinner hour rush. Likewise, a barber cannot store his idle time to trim the hair of additional customers later in the day. But the view of inventory in a service business is changing. I read an article some years ago by Professor Sunil Chopra from Northwestern University. Professor Chopra is a world renowned expert in operations management, so people take note of anything he publishes. His thoughts were that the concept of a push-pull boundary can be applied to…
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