The Impact of Just-in-Time Inventory on This New World

Ten years ago, it was fashionable in some quarters to wonder where the payoffs to all of our investments in technology were. In those pre-Internet days, technology meant personal computers, nearly all equipped with modems, but few linked together in meaningful networks. Had we simply replaced our IBM typewriters and Hewlett-Packard or Texas Instruments calculators with expensive toys forever in need of upgrades?

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Hardly. Much of the continuous prosperity of the 1990s can be attributed to systemwide efficiencies in inventory management; Wal-Mart (WMT Quote) and Dell (DELL Quote), in particular, were exemplars in their respective industries of how to drive costs down by minimizing inventory costs. Their lessons in corporate inventory management led to an early and as-yet-unfulfilled promise of even greater savings from Web-based supply-chain management. ...