Flexible Deployment: Making Decisions that Optimize Service and Costs

In today's quick‐response marketplace, it is becoming more and more difficult for business to react to the pressing demands of customers and consumers. Try as they might, they cannot achieve perfect knowledge of the market's actual demands. Instead, success depends upon making operations more flexible. In particular, management must work to build new flexibility into deployment—i.e., the allocation of available finished goods to meet immediate demands.