Any business that serves customers must build its strategy around customer service. For any participant in the supply chain — including producers, distributors, suppliers and service providers — that means delivering products as ordered and on time. The second priority is to make the best of your resources to deliver that high level of customer service. That means controlling costs. Any company can deliver whatever a customer wants whenever they want it, given enough inventory staged strategically to be delivered quickly. But that’s prohibitively expensive and downright impractical, if not impossible.