Inventory
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Negotiation Anatomy™
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Inventory
Headline: Work in progress. Usually a second-order waste, where there are bottlenecks on your production line and half-processed inventory stacks up waiting for the next step, meaning the real waste here is waiting, rather than inventory per se.
But— time is money, as the old saw has it — so the longer the overall negotiation process takes, the more expensive the inventory.
In the context of contract negotiation, inventory is coterminous with waiting — not being a bearer instrument, a legal contract has no intrinsic value even when completed — it is what you do with it that creates the risk and reward — so having a hopper overflowing with half-completed credit support annexes does not of itself represent a large waste. But the fact that they are stacked up waiting for someone to answer an email — be it the client, trading, risk or credit — it stretches out the production time.