What is inventory?

A break from my usual ranting I want to ask you a question.

A conversation with a colleague recently asked me the same question and I think it would be interesting to hear what others in the industry think. This colleague was attending training with a new company and was told by the person leading the group that the expectation was that everything on board would be carried as inventory, tracked and issued out.

At first I thought this was ridiculous as the effort required to carry every single consumable, office supply and PPE item in inventory and issue them out individually would be not worth the effort. After I thought more on the subject I saw there could be a time saving also by no longer having to manually control the consumables and their replenishment. If all of these items were in a locked controlled warehouse and they were all set up with replenishment values (mins/maxs) then there would no longer be any thinking required. Records of quantities issued would be easier to get and proper forecasting of requirements could be done.

So I ask you this, what does your company do and do you think this would work or wouldn't work and why? I know its a very open question but I think we could learn a lot from the conversation.