Customer Reviews

Crisp: Basics of Inventory Management: From Warehouse to Distribution Center (Crisp Fifty-Minute Books)

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I bought the book based on it's title. I wanted a quick overview of the subject and this is exactly what it gave me. It is an easy read and covers most of the basics.

It spends a bit too much time on unnecessary financial information, and too little on the link between inventory and purchasing, but other than this it is well rounded.

It contains a number of very simple exercises (a bit too basic sometimes) that reinforce what you have read. These are useful.

The book contains mostly all of the required equations and formulae that an inventory controller would need.

Recommended reading as a refresher for professionals, or a start-up guide for students and people new to the industry.

As the title implies, this is a "basics" book. Actually more of a workbook than a book, it quickly covers the basic concepts of inventory management. A little forecasting, a little lot sizing, a little accounting etc.
This little workbook could be very useful as part of an in-house training program for workers unfamiliar with inventory management.

BASICS OF INVENTORY MANAGEMENT is astoundingly worthless. For the price, I thought, how could I go wrong? Indeed, I went wrong.

The author clearly has an extensive background in discreet manufacturing, but he is unable to rise above the paradigm. His short book attempts to cover the basics of discreet manufacturing as it relates to inventory management. Note that this is in contrast to the book's title, which does not suggest such a specific and narrow focus.

The author makes no effort to discuss basic inventory management from a pure warehousing perspective. Every example given is within the context of a discreet manufacturing environment, and quizzically, assumes the reader to knows a great deal about manufacturing while imparting no useful knowledge in terms of inventory management. The book is of absolutely no value for anyone outside a manufacturing environment.

For a book that contains only 121 pages, the reader will be surprised to find several sections, each several pages in length, where the text simply makes no sense. These sections appear to be placed into the book at random, without explanation or excuse. Chapters, called modules, contain one bulleted list after another, mostly without meaning. It is as if the author is so familiar with the material, he assumes the reader will know his meaning without an explanation. The result is a puzzling and bizarre collection of seemingly disassociated facts, manufacturing anecdotes, and pointless tidbits of information.

At the end of each module are a few short exercises to reinforce the material, and answers to each exercise are in the back of the book. This would be very useful if the answers to the questions posed in the exercises had been presented in the module, but the questions tend to beg speculation that a reader familiar only with the text would have no hope of answering. The questions that stick to the technical aspects of manufacturing, such as calculating lot sizes, might be useful if the author consistently supplied the reader with the appropriate formula and supporting data, but in most cases one or both is missing.

Everything mentioned above would contribute greatly to the feeling that the book had been thrown together with little thought and even less editing, but as if to underscore the idea, the book is riddled with errors -- and not just the typographical variety. These are serious errors that a reader without experience in manufacturing would not catch. These are errors in the very heart of the material, facts presented that are simply wrong.

All in all, BASICS OF INVENTORY MANAGEMENT is not worth its small price. It is deceptively titled, so if you are looking to learn what the title suggests, the text will not suffice. If you know enough about manufacturing to understand the few intelligible sections, you already know more than this book will teach.

As a Supply Chain Manager and trainer I use this book for all purchasing and planning new hires and they are required to read it and do the exercises in the first week of training. It is an easy read, exercises and quick reference for min/max, Safety stock, MRP, EOQ and financial reporting.