Purchasing and inventory management techniques for optimizing inventory investment

In an effort to reduce operations and maintenance costs among nuclear plants, many utilities are taking a closer look at their inventory investment. Various approaches for inventory reduction have been used and discussed, but these approaches are often limited to an inventory management perspective. Interaction with purchasing and planning personnel to reduce inventory investment is a necessity in utility efforts to become more cost competitive. This paper addresses the activities that purchasing and inventory management personnel should conduct in an effort to optimize inventory investment while maintaining service-level goals. Other functions within a materials management organization, such as the warehousing and investment recovery functions, can contribute to optimizing inventory investment. However, these are not addressed in this paper because their contributions often come after inventory management and purchasing decisions have been made