Effective inventory management also means being ready to cope with problems. Divide into groups based on the companies you selected in Question 1, and discuss how you could design an inventory system that would adapt to “shocks”

like the ones described below.

Storybook characters like Madeline, Babar the Elephant, and even Stinky Cheese Man come alive under the watchful eye of Wendy Goldstein of Columbus, Ohio. Her company, Costume Specialists, fashions the complicated costumes for these characters from scratch and sells the creations to book publishers and bookstore chains. Each costume takes about 60 to 80 hours of artistic effort and costs up to $3,000 in materials and labor to produce. Goldstein’s business brings in $600,000 annually.
Catch the Wave Catch the Wave is a marketing information and graphics design firm located in Minneapolis. The company designs web pages for clients wanting to get on the Internet. Its 20 employees have varied experience in design, advertising, writing, photography, and computer graphics. Prices charged to clients depend on the sophistication and interactivity desired for their web sites. The popularity of the Internet and World Wide Web has sent the company’s annual revenues soaring to $7 million. This figure is expected to continue to rise, as more and more clients want to “catch the wave.”