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Case AnalysisFor the past two months our gross revenue on copper fitting has almost treble due to the increasing demand from the market and the competitors unsuccessful selling promotion. However, the problem rises from the overwhelming demand. Many back orders are just piled up on the store managers desk, and some of the guests lost their patience with us.What we really need right now is to limit or reduce the abnormal demand from the customers by raising the price of our products, but to gain a reputation from our customers, we should consider completing all the backorders with a original price. In a long term, the beginning to solve this inventory shortage still relies on sufficient and on-time supply from our supplies.The main reason causing this tremendous and unusual high demand from the customer is the loosing market share of our competitors. Also, there is a possibility that some customers have the false expectation astir(predicate) the future price of the market. They heard the rumor about the bell of raw copper material might go up, so they predict that the price of the copper fitting should go up as well. Consequently, they stick to make more purchases and store more inventories more than usual to save some money after the price of copper rises. After a in effect(p) discussion with our marketing and warehouse managers, we found a strategy to solve this inventory shortage crisis. We can purchase overstocked merchandises a really low cost from our competitors, since their business is slow, and they do not have enough cash flow. Since most of our competitors are local, we can save a bundle from the shipping and handling if we sully their products. But the disadvantage of this is that it might confuse our customers, because the products we purchase from other companies have their own logos. It might become an opportunity for our competitors to get free advertisement on their products through our market chain. We can also begin placing big orde rs to our supplier to prevent future shortage. However, downside of this is the risk for overstock inventory. The price of copper fitting is very hard for us to foresee, if the price of fitting drops due to other companies new wave of promotions or other macroeconomic influences, then it will slow our sales down as well as our cash flow.