This was fascinating! Thanks for it.

It means to pointlessly take something to a place that already has it in abundance.

Excession, by Iain M Banks.

Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer’s kiss through the few millimetres’ thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum.  What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

Gorgeous.

No disagreements here! What you’re doing here is recognising that the waste incurred from storage is less of a problem than the waste incurred through Transportation, or Waiting for resupply. In this case, inventory is waste worth doing. Any workshop needs to keep SOME spare parts, every house needs to have SOME food in the freezer. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a kind of waste to store stuff – a fact people acknowledge when they choose not to rent a warehouse to store even more.

What I’m saying is that it’s a trade-off. In fact it’s a pretty bland statement, obvious when you think about it, but putting it into words like this can be helpful when making processes more efficient.

It’s an idea from Lean management. Everything you need to keep, prevents you from keeping something else; requires you to remember where it is, where you could be remembering something else; takes longer to move when you have to move it; takes longer to organise than having less would. It poses fire hazards that having nothing wouldn’t pose. Blocks light that having nothing wouldn’t block. Keeping stuff is inherently wasteful.

None of this is to say that keeping stuff is bad. It may be very useful to keep it. But you should always recognise that doing so incurs a cost that you need to trade off against its usefulness.

While we’re on it, inventory is one of the eight kinds of waste identified in Lean. They are:

• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Waiting
• Overproduction
• Overprocessing
• Defects
• Skills (misuse of)

Remember TIM WOODS.

All of this is meant for running a factory, but I’ve found a lot of them useful in other bits of life, especially the idea that Inventory is a form of waste.

Inventory is waste.