Understand production inventory

- I started in the semiconductor industry many years ago as a night shift supervisor for a small company in Dallas. We made memory chips for computer companies like IBM. Memory chips are a generic product with no customized features, so our production plan was based on a forecast of expected demand rather than actual orders. So we used what is commonly called a push strategy. We started a specific amount of inventory each week and pushed it through the factory, solving problems along the way. One week, we were having maintenance problems with a particular machine. Each morning at the end of my shift, I would report to my manager that more and more work in process was stacking up at this machine. After several days of reporting this problem, I told my manager that we had run out of table space to store the work at this station. There simply was no more room to stack the material. His response? He told me to go to Walmart…