For proactive management of the distribution chain performance, the role of distribution chain management should be focused. One way to do this is to expand the scope of the inventory management to cover also supplier and demand man- agement aspects in addition to the internal inventory control processes (Fig. 3). The expanded scope significantly increases complexity in the manager’s responsibilities. Therefore the focus points of the management should be in the interferences between the three aspects as they are the points where the variances are visible. Due to the high number of controllable materials and complexity of the distribution chain, categorization framework is needed to effectively analyze the areas where distribution chain performance requires the most attention