Figure 1.6 Xerox: the impact on inventories
The impact of the new build philosophies on the downstream supply chain processes can be judged from Figure 1.6. While the traditional inventory profile shows a maxi-mum number of days of stock (shown in the shaded area) at finished product level, this is risky. It always seems that demand is greatest for the very items that are not available! Postponing the decision on exact specification until as late as possible in the process, when we are more likely to know precisely what the end-customer wants, helps to create the much flattened inventory profile to the right of the diagram. These are issues to which we return in Chapters 6 and 7. (A development of this case, tracking ‘what happened next’, is Case Study 7.12.)