库存管理是什么？外文翻译.doc

外文翻译 原文 What?Is?Inventory?Management？ Material Source: Author: Dr. Hermann Gruenwald What Is Inventory Management? Companies used to measure their muscle by the size of their inventory. Bigger was better. Vast warehouses filled to capacity ensured efficient assembly lines and guaranteed that, come hell or high water, production would never stop. Who cared about carrying costs? They would be erased by increased sales. But now that equation has changed. ? Lowering inventories is one of the quickest ways to decrease working capital needs. Performance measurements, such as the old standby ROA (return on assets) and the newer EVA (economic value added), as well as other measures that gauge how efficiently capital is used, have become more common organizational drivers. In fact, many times an executives bonus depends, at least in part, on how efficiently capital is used. Couple the drive for efficient capital use with the need to respond more quickly to changes in customer demand, with shorter and shorter order-to-delivery cycle times, and you have a problem that is challenging many organizations. ? Leaner and Meaner In the big picture, American business has succeeded in its quest to run lean. But almost all these gains in inventory reduction happened from 1981 to 1991, and the past 10 years have not seen much improvement. Inventory as a percent of GDP held steady at 3.8 percent from 1992 to 2000. Rather than being eliminated, inventory has been pushed down into the lower reaches of the supply chain, from manufacturers to top-tier suppliers to lower-tier suppliers. GM, for example, improved inventory turns, a common metric that measures total cost of goods sold divided by average inventory, and serves as a valuable indication of how often a company sells out its inventory (the higher the better) - 55.2 percent between 1996 and 2001. However, the company that supplies its tires, Goodyear, saw its inventory turns decline 21 percent during that same time. In other words,