Supply chain and operations management professionals have a love-hate relationship with inventory. In production, there’s nothing worse than getting ready to start a job and discovering that parts are unavailable. Likewise, from a customer service perspective, it’s impossible to fulfill customer demand without the right amount of the right inventory at the right time. People in our profession love having parts and products when we need them, but hate any amount of inventory that ties up company money; takes up space; and causes extra, non-value adding work to handle, store, count, and manage.