5-4.5 Stock Positioning

Stock positioning uses the information gathered for the provisioning process and applies it to where material should be optimally placed to meet activity requirements. It considers criticality, maintainability factors, and the cycle times to get the material from storage points to the use location. Key to this analysis is that speed of delivery can offset the need for larger quantities of inventory, but this needs to be based on the potential effect each alternative has on the TCO (e.g., we can reduce the quantity of local inventory, but if that increases the user downtime and costs or results in a revenue loss, then this decision is not the best TCO for this supply chain situation).