RETAIL INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

All organizations hold stocks. These are the stores of materials they keep until needed. A shop, for
example, buys goods from a wholesaler and keeps them into stock till it sells them to customers; a farmer
stores hay to feed his animals over the winter; a research company has a stock of information; a bank holds
cash for its day-to-day transactions. Whenever an organization has materials that it does not use
immediately, it puts them into stock. You might imagine stock as warehouses full of goods but every
organization holds stock, even those providing the most intangible service. A retail company stores faces the
same problems of inventory management as a giant manufacturer with its stores of finished goods and
components. This is a book about Retail Inventory Management. It describes recent thinking about retail
stock and methods for its control. We have concentrated on the core questions of retail inventory management
in this book What exactly is inventory management in retail? How do decisions about stock affect sales in
retail operations? How can we control stocks and overall cost? What information do we need? What is the
effect of new methods and technology? The answers to these questions embrace the most important issues of
inventory management.