Interesting Advice on Supply Chain Management

If you want more of this sort of stuff, let me know? It's avoided here most of the time because so much of this talk from academics can be so... well, er... academic! But this sounded interesting. It comes off of page three in this lengthy article and you'd probably have to start at the beginning to get the whole idea, but maybe there's something to this? Is this University of California professor the next Peter Drucker?

A well-constructed supply and distribution chain can be its own forecasting tool. I urge your readers not to think of the goal of supply-chain management to always inventory as slow as possible just to tighten, tighten and tighten. In times of recovery, economic recovery and expansion, you actually want to decrease your inventory turnover ratio. But that is not the goal in and of itself. The goal essentially is to move more products into the sales channel at a time when you think demand is going to be moving upward. That way, you can push out your competitors and take advantage of the pent-up demand that gets unleashed. This goes to the point of macro-managing vs. micro-managing your inventory. I think that is a really important distinction, because businesses tend to focus on micro-managing their supply chain, in a sense that they are always trying to squeeze things down, when in fact it is often better to move things up.