Accordingly, production planning required adequate, but costly, inventory safety stocks, and backup teams of people to maintain quality control and for emergency response to the unanticipated and the misjudged. Large remnants of information void, of course, still persist and forecasts of future events on which all business decisions ultimately depend are still inevitably uncertain.
But the recent years’ remarkable surge in the availability of real-time information has enabled business management to remove large swaths of inventory safety stocks and worker redundancies, and has armed workers with detailed data to fine tune product specifications to most individual customer needs.