Demand and Inventory Planning Judgment for Supply Chain and Operations TeamsEvery stockout has a decision behind it that looked reasonable at the time.

Methodology: Thirty-four original exercises across six formats: fourteen situational judgement items, six slider estimates, four keyed single-choice items, five select-every-that-applies exercises, three keyed claims and two ordering exercises. The declared response instruction is behavioural tendency throughout - what you are most likely to do - and one instruction covers the whole form. Construct statement: it measures how somebody reads a demand signal, decides how much cover a line needs, allocates a shortage and decides whether to expedite, treats supplier and lead-time exposure, and deals with stock that has stopped moving. It does not test any named planning system, it does not certify anybody against a professional body's syllabus, it is not a numerical reasoning test, and it says nothing about performance in any particular supply chain. Scoring is a reliability-weighted composite. Each of the five parts is chance-corrected against the authored answer priors carried by its own exercises - option priors on the choice items and a declared answer distribution on each slider, so the null on a slider is what people actually answer rather than a uniform draw across the range. Omega is then estimated for each part from its item count and a stated assumed average inter-item correlation, and the composite declares whether it weighted by reliability or used equal weights: differential weighting is used only when the spread of omega across the parts exceeds .15, and below that the report says that unit weights are a decision rather than a default. A part built from fewer than about eight exercises carries a three-way placement and no number, and the refusal is printed as a table rather than performed silently. Constructs and sources: forecast error decomposed into bias and variability, and the tracking of bias as the correctable component; the newsvendor trade-off between holding cost and shortage cost as the basis of a service level; safety stock as a function of demand and lead-time variability rather than of volume; the bullwhip effect and the way ordering policy amplifies demand variability upstream (Lee, Padmanabhan and Whang); the economic order quantity and the holding cost implicit in a quantity discount; allocation under scarcity and the difference between contractual exposure, dependence and the order of arrival; the sunk-cost effect and its role in retaining obsolete stock (Arkes and Blumer); price fencing and channel separation in markdown decisions; McDonald's omega rather than alpha as the reliability estimate for a composite of unequal parts; and item-writing guidance from Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez. All items are original works written for this instrument. No vendor, planning system, professional body or certification syllabus is reproduced, named or implied, and no endorsement or affiliation exists or is suggested.