This article evaluates the premise of demand adherence to Normal distribution in inventory management models showing that such consideration can bring about significant distortions, mainly to very slow and slow moving items. Accordingly, the article proposes a framework to help identifying the best stock policy to be adopted, given the characteristics of each item. As an additional contribution, the paper presents an application of this framework on the set of spare parts of a Brazilian company making evident its main benefits in terms of shortage and excess costs.
Stock; Lead time demand; Coefficient of variation; Framework; Costs
