Businesses, to protect production schedules, found it essential, although costly, to carry sizable backup stocks of materials and to keep additional persons on their payrolls for making the necessary adjustments to the inevitable miscalculations and unanticipated shifts in demand for their products and services.
1  BIS Review 57/2000  Of course, a great deal of imprecision persists, but the remarkable surge in the availability of real-time information has enabled businesses to reduce unnecessary inventory and dispense with labor and capital redundancies. Intermediate production and distribution processes, so essential when information and quality control were poor, are being bypassed or eliminated.