An interesting case study of inventory. You can see that it still is an issue of great importance to businesses.
Accurate knowledge of demand flow is very important in predicting the amount of inventory to carry, if the product is selling fairly frequently.
The authors found that a few big customers were placing unusual big orders and that was driving outages. We’ve known this for 30 or more years; I observed it at a disk drive company I was product manager for in Silicon Valley. Manage the big orders and you manage inventory.
But that does not reduce the value of inventory models and predictions of service level.
Supply Chain and Logistics 