Inventory, a necessary waste

Generally speaking, the MRP calculation procedure is more cumbersome and costly than inventory management methods (see [AG 5 110] ). However, industrial companies often have to manage very large numbers of items (often several tens of thousands).

Under these conditions, it's not clear that MRP should be applied to all items. Other inventory management methods can be used for independent demand items with the following characteristics:

• low-value items that are therefore inexpensive to keep in stock, provided they are not used for a...