At the end of this volume, several years in the making, it is worth reflecting upon the objectives the editorial team had in mind when we started this project. We were motivated by the disturbing observation that although academia seemed to view the problems of planning production and inventories as a largely solved problem, with basic formulations established and agreed upon, there was broad consensus among our industrial colleagues that the available models and solution techniques were a long way from representing the full richness and complexity of the task as they encountered it in their daily operations. Our objective with these volumes was to address this situation by bringing together a leading group of researchers and practitioners to delineate the broader boundaries of the problem and present the state of the art in various related areas. A representative sample of leading-edge industrial contributions illustrates the state of the art in industrial practice, while a selection of research contributions with a more academic bent explores specific aspects of new areas.