From Teaching to Implementing Inventory Management: Problems of Translation

This article addresses the problems, difficulties, pitfalls, and drawbacks in inventory management, from teaching and research in academia to applying, installing, and successfully using inventory systems in practice. Some guidelines and suggestions are offered to students, teachers, analysts, users and managers of inventory systems. Several of these guidelines are not uniquely associated with inventory management but apply equally well to the entire OR/MS area. This article is to some extent based on the discussions of a symposium with the same title that the authors organized and participated in during the 11th National Meeting of the American Institute for Decision Sciences, New Orleans, November 1979.