It has often been said that the scarcity of space in industrialised Japan has made the nation conscious of the need to make the most productive use of all physical resources, including inventory. Whether this is true is of academic interest only – what is the case is that the widely held view in Japanese industry is that inventory is waste.
An analogy that is frequently drawn in Japan is that an organisation’s investment in inventory is like a large, deep lake (see Figure 6.12). Well below the surface of this lake are numerous jagged rocks, but because of the depth of the water, the captain of the ship need have no fear of striking one of them.
Figure 6.12 Inventory hides the problems
The comparison with business ...
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