By expanding the notion of waste and non-value-added activities under consideration, lean practices became applicable not only to downstream stages of the supply chain but to multiple industries and their corresponding product procurement processes servicing local and global markets. provides an overview of prior research addressing environmental implications across different stages of consumer goods supply chains. Given their compartmentalized and sequential nature, collective findings
describe functionally isolated views resulting in local process improvement opportunities. An alternative approach to capture the internal dynamics between logistics and retailing processes is to examine the underlying inventory management methods that guide them.