Application of TRIZ to Inventory Management

Since there are fundamental contradictions in difficult engineering problems, most solutions have been trade‐offs between conflicting requirements. In those cases, an improvement of a system parameter causes deterioration of another parameter in the system. TRIZ, a structured method for creative problem solving, is used to obtain breakthrough solutions resolving or eliminating the contradictions. In this paper, it is examined that the engineering‐based TRIZ approach can be successfully used in inventory management. The result shows that there is good chance of applying TRIZ to managerial problems.