THE EMPIRICAL DETERMINANTS OF INVENTORY LEVELS IN HIGH‐VOLUME MANUFACTURING

Marvin B. Lieberman · Susan R. Helper · Lieven Demeester

91 citations0/0 files storedProduction and Operations Management

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Supply Chain and Inventory Management Management and Optimization Techniques Quality and Supply Management

Abstract

This study uses survey data on several hundred automotive suppliers in North America to evaluate the determinants of inventory levels in high‐volume discrete parts manufacturing. We assess the magnitude of raw materials, work‐in‐process, and finished goods inventories held at automotive supply plants. Inventories are shown to be jointly determined by technological and managerial factors in a manner roughly consistent with classical inventory theory. Several categories of managerial practices are found to be important. Low inventories are linked to employee problem solving and frequent communication with customers. More unexpectedly, we find the absence of inventory differences between U.S.‐owned and Japanese‐owned plants in North America. This contrasts with substantial differences in inventory holding between US plants and those in Japan.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 91 citations exist upstream.

References

1996SPECIALIZED SUPPLIER NETWORKS AS A SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: EVIDENCE FROM THE AUTO INDUSTRY 1979Decision Systems for Inventory Management and Production Planning 1983Japanese Manufacturing Techniques: Nine Hidden Lessons in Simplicity 1983Toyota Production System: Practical Approach to Production Management 1996Does Governance Matter? Keiretsu Alliances and Asset Specificity as Sources of Japanese Competitive Advantage 1995Supplier Relations in Japan and the United States: Are They Converging?1991Transplanted Organizations: The Transfer of Japanese Industrial Organization to the U.S.1988The New Manufacturing Challenge: Techniques for Continuous Improvement

Cited by

2003Foreign direct investment and host country productivity: the American automotive component industry in the 1980s 2006Empirical Research Published in Production and Operations Management (1992–2005): Trends and Future Research Directions 2017Inventories and the concentration of suppliers and customers: Evidence from the Chinese manufacturing sector 2014Management Practices, Relational Contracts, and the Decline of General Motors

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.