Moving Beyond Trade‐offs

Logisticians are trained to identify trade‐offs and to devise compromising solutions which produce the lowest total costs. For example, the economic batch size is a compromise between setup costs and inventory carrying costs. Presents a problem‐analysis technique which helps the analyst to eliminate the problem so that no compromise is ecessary. For example, instead of balancing inventory‐carrying costs and setup costs a solution which produces both lower setup costs and lower inventory‐carrying costs would be sought. Discusses a description of the techniques and several examples of its application to logistical problems.