In this paper we have tackled the outstanding inventory planning problems over new product launching period in a more holistic manner by addressing first the definition of efficient business rules to effectively control and reduce the inventory risks followed by the rigorous explanations on the implementation guide on suggested inventory planning rules. It is not unusual for many companies in the consumer electronics market to make a great effort to reduce the time to launch a new product because the ability to bring out higher performing products in such a short time period greatly increases the probability for them to remain competitive in the high tech market. Among so many newly developed products, those products with new features and technologies appeal to many potential customers while products which fail to win customers by design and prices rapidly disappear in the market. To adapt to this business environment, those companies have been trying to find the answer to minimize the inventory of old products so they can move to next generation products quickly with less obsolete material . In the experimental implementation of our rule-based inventory planning, Company ‘S’ reduced the inventory cost for the outgoing products as low as 49% of its peak level of its preceding product version in just 5 month after the adoption of rule-based inventory planning process and system. This paper concluded the subject with a suggestion that the best performance of rule-based inventory planning is guaranteed not from one-time campaign of process improvement along with system development but the decision maker’s continuing support and attention even without seeing any upcoming business crisis.

1. Introduction
 2. Literature Review
 3. Two Issues in Inventory Planningupon New Product Launching
  3.1 Excessive & Obsolete Products’ Inventoriesfor Old version of Product
  3.2 Loss of Sales Opportunity for New Product
 4. Implementing Rule-based InventoryPlanning
  4.1 Defining the Rule-based Inventory PlanningImplementation Project
  4.2 The Changes in Rule-based Inventory Planning
 5. Benefits of Rule-based Inventory Planning
  5.1 Optimized New Product Launch
  5.2 Minimized E&O Inventory
 6. Conclusion
 References

• 김형태(우송대학교 국제경영학부) | Hyoungtae Kim Corresponding Author