Once upon a time, I worked at a small collectibles company; that is to say, the company was both small in size and made small collectibles.  However, there was one aspect of that business which was quite large—inventory.  Not only was their warehouse chock full of unsold product, there were dozens of pallets with hundreds of boxes, stacked 10 or 15 high in some cases, filled with outdated catalogs, flyers and inserts.  The owners, having invested so much money in this collateral, were loath to give it up even though it was eating up a significant amount of warehouse space (did I mention it was a climate-controlled space? Gotta keep all that useless paper from rotting!).  It made a lasting impression on me as to the sheer waste and futility of it all.

Fast-forward to today.  In his post titled “Is Inventory Still Evil?“, Paul Barsch comments:

…every B-school graduate knows companies should balance enough inventory to meet customer needs while accommodating shifting preferences.

Admittedly, he’s talking about product inventory as opposed to print collateral.  But the principles are the same: balance and flexibility.  In the offset print world, that’s a very tricky prospect indeed.  However, the digital print world offers the kind of balance and flexibility that would have reduced the amount of excess print collateral at that small collectibles company to, at most, a single box!  And if they had underestimated the amount of flyers they needed for a given month, they could have ordered up another batch and had it delivered to their door the next day!  Then, they could have converted the reclaimed warehouse space into a sweet employee lounge with a nice, big 108″ LCD HDTV or two, a well-stocked library of Blu-ray movies, a Wii, a PS3, an Xbox 360 and a… but I digress.

Guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with the hyper-spastic rush supplied by this 6-hour Jolt Endurance Shot.  Hmm… I’d better drink a second one just to make sure.  Caffeine, take me away!