1) That's a complex question. The maintenance and curation of the system itself and the data within it is a non-trivial task, which adds overhead. If you don't

1) That's a complex question. The maintenance and curation of the system itself and the data within it is a non-trivial task, which adds overhead. If you don't right-size your process/system to your needs, and maintain it adequately, then it very well could be a net negative on resource efficiency. Plenty of people will blindly follow what the system recommends, even when a basic sanity check would warn you otherwise. On that note, different companies define resource efficiency differently. You adjust your model according to your priorities. If you're fine with a certain level of out of stock products or long lead times, you can bake that into your model. With the net result (when coupled with supply planning) being that you reduce the amount of working capital tied up in inventory, at risk of reducing sale volume by not having stock when someone requests it. Or you can go the other way and prioritize in-stock status, which will incorporate a buffer into your model to account for enough variability to never be out of stock when an order comes through. But you'll tie up massive amounts of working capital in inventory costs to do so. 2) I don't have any off the top of my head. But some of hte terms to look at are ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning), demand planning, just in time planning, demand forecasting 3) There are all kinds of systems for different scale businesses and different industries. SAP is the dominant player in large scale supply chains, but there are plenty of smaller players as well both in supply chain and other industries. You also don't necessarily need an external product - at one point in time, I was planning about $300MM in inventory and about $1BN in demand using Excel. We did that manually for almost a year, replicating the entire model and just pulling the raw data from SAP to input into the Excel model, in order to validate a new technique in a variety of our manufacturing plants before dropping ~$100MM+ to have SAP create a custom planning module for us using the methodology. It was a pain to abuse Excel to the extent to use that quantity of data (before the days of PowerQuery and being able to embed an entire SQL database into Excel). But functionally, it worked perfectly. My email is in my profile - feel free to reach out. I can probably give you a bit more targeted advice if I knew more about your business itself.