re: Interview question

Just try and find some sort of example where you went against the status quo.

This will probably make no sense to you, but I work in the supply chain industry.

I would answer as follows......

"At my company we typically applied a standard buffer of two weeks onto our products. This started to become a problem because we began to accrue inventory levels that were too high. We couldn't just cut all our buffer because we have various families that have very volatile demand. One month they will see 100 units, the next they will sell 5000. So we had to be creative in how we began to buffer our products. I looked at forecast accuracy on various families as well as demand standard deviations by month and came up with differential buffer levels by product family. Within 6 months we cut our inventory excess inventory in half from $300 million to $150 million."