Patent ID: 7373371

Claim:
A method for utilizing excess inventory in a manufacturing environment, said excess inventory comprising parts used in end products, comprising: translating sales specific terminology describing said end products into bill of material terminology describing said parts used in end products via a bill of material structure, said translating including mapping between features associated with end items and parts required to build said end items; and utilizing said bill of material structure, determining an optimal build plan for said end items that, if built, would consume a desired quantity and/or type of excess inventory; wherein said determining an optimal build plan includes: formulating constraints related to usage of parts in producing end items utilizing: data provided in said bill of material structure; and manufacturing process data resulting in at least one saleable end item, said manufacturing process data comprising at least one of: costs; revenue data; inventory data; usage rates; yields; capacities; cycle times; and alternate parts; and optimizing said constraints utilizing at least one of: heuristics; linear programming; artificial intelligence; and non-linear optimization; and wherein selecting an end item from a list of saleable items capable of consuming excess inventory comprises: applying an algorithm comprising: k*ei; wherein k is a scalar factor referring to a selectable number operable for expressing an upper limit on how much to spend on additional parts in order to use up one dollar of excess inventory; and wherein further, ‘ei’ represents an amount in dollars of excess inventory consumed when producing one unit of an item ‘i’.