Came here to echo this, but for grocery stores ala Amazon's bumbled attempts to optimize Whole Foods stocking. Your use case and the parent's sound like a good

Came here to echo this, but for grocery stores ala Amazon's bumbled attempts to optimize Whole Foods stocking. Your use case and the parent's sound like a good use of JIT Kanban[1], waiting for inventory levels to drop below a threshold to replenish them. However, demand-forecasting[2] may also be useful in the parent's use case, and sometimes both systems are used in a product lifecycle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_forecasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_forecasting