1. Introduction
Managing assets of all kinds can be viewed as an inventory problem, for the same
principles apply to cash and fixed assets as to inventories themselves. Traditionally,
the academic literature on inventory focuses on production and procurement as the
principal determinants of corporate inventory policy and management. In this sense,
the trade-off between ordering costs and holding costs characterizes the transactions
approach to inventory management represented by the EOQ and (S, s) models of
inventory developed many decades ago. In recent years, as the field of operations
management has developed, many new concepts have been added to the list of relevant
inventory control topics. These more management-oriented topics include the material
requirements planning systems (MRP), just-in-time (JIT) and ERP methods while
another emerging stream of studies postulates that the characteristics of a firm’s
demand and marketing environments also play an important role in determining
optimal corporate inventories. Notwithstanding the theoretical or practical shortcomings inherent in these concepts and techniques, their application in real
business life should have an effect in firms’ performance (Koh et al., 2007)