On November 13, 2025, at the invitation of the Department of Management Science, Professor Ruud Teunter from the University of Groningen delivered an academic lecture titled “Inventory Control: Service Level Differentiation” to faculty members and students of the School of Economics and Management.
In his presentation, Professor Teunter introduced new criteria within the ABC inventory classification framework and addressed the widely used industry metric of fill rate as a measure of service level. He noted that guidance on how to differentiate fill rates at the individual stock-keeping unit (SKU) level remains highly limited. In both academic literature and industry practice, the typical approach is to assign service levels to individual SKUs based on overall inventory targets or category-level benchmarks (such as ABC classifications).
Professor Teunter and his research team argue that this conventional approach is far from optimal. They proposed a simple yet effective alternative method, which has been validated using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that the method can significantly reduce inventory investment. Moreover, due to its intuitive design and ease of implementation, the approach has strong potential for adoption by practitioners and software providers.
Following the lecture, Professor Teunter engaged in in-depth discussions with faculty and students on key issues in inventory management, including the definition of service levels, cost modeling, and whether firms should adopt appropriate forecasting and differentiated service level strategies. He also addressed a range of questions raised by the audience.
Speaker Profile
Professor Ruud H. Teunter is a Professor of Operations Management and Operations Research at the Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has previously held academic positions at universities in Magdeburg (Germany), Thessaloniki (Greece), Rotterdam (the Netherlands), and Lancaster (UK).
His research interests include forecasting and inventory control, logistics and supply chain management, routing and transportation optimization, and production and maintenance operations. He has published over 120 articles in leading journals such as Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Operations Management, Omega, Transportation Research Part B, and European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR). He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Operational Research.
Contributed by: Department of Management Science
Edited by: Ge Zehui
Reviewed by: Jin Jiahua
