Virtual Inventory

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With the advent of the Internet, many companies who sell products with designs are relying less on a physical inventory and more on an online inventory of products with designs on them. This requires a plant or facility with the ability to print or produce on demand. This is known as a "Virtual Inventory." While predicting inventory quantities has always been a financial challenge for businesses, it has also reduced the choices available to consumers. The growing use of virtual inventories over the last ten years has given consumers vastly greater choices in the areas of signage, apparel as well as logo items. Digital printing machines have been just as essential as the Internet to opening the door toward a virtual inventory business model. New machines that skip the screen printing process and allow direct to sign or direct to garment printing have made the model possible.

Virtual inventory typically will cost more than physical inventory since each item must be printed as it is ordered, rather than the much less expensive model of printing thousands of items in a production run.