The framework presented in this article grew out of thinking about two observations. First, the push-pull boundary has been a very fruitful concept in supply-chain management. Many firms have gained significant operational improvements by carefully thinking about what should be done to forecast and what should be done in response to demand. Second, the basics of managing business processes are nearly universal. That is, while each business and industry faces unique challenges, there are fundamental similarities in what drives process performance. The question was how to apply the concept of the push-pull boundary to services. Reconceptualizing the push-pull boundary as how to store work, as opposed to where to hold physical product, led us to thinking about service inventory as a way to describe and manage service processes. We then moved on to the implications of service inventory — how is it similar to or different from product inventory, and how does it impact service performance? In the future, we hope to sharpen the concept and investigate how organizations can best apply service