EOQ

ECONOMIC ORDER QUANTITY (EOQ)

(Economic Order Quantity) The most economical quantity of a product that should be purchased at one time. The EOQ is based on all associated costs for ordering and maintaining the product.

More details at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_order_quantity

This concept which is used in supply chain management for determining the optimum amount of materials that should be purchased usually based upon two chief criteria -
1. The more you order, the more discount you get, hence cost per unit reduces
2. The more quantity you have, more is the cost of storing these items.

These two forces kind of act in opposite directions. Hence the EOQ point is a kind of trade off between them

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But I think, the concept of EOQ doesn't end here. It can be applied to any aspect in life.

Say, for example eating. Without it you are undernourished and if in excess, you risk obesity.
Or physical exercise, without it you risk bad health. If overdone you become too tired and exhausted.

Think of stardom. If one is unknown usually he/ she tries to be popular, but i they reach somewhere in top of popularity chart they start yearning for some privacy.

Philosophers have always argued that without sadness, happiness loses it worth. Refining it further, one cannot be happy, rather TOO happy all the time. Maybe life has some EOQ of happiness, and there is a fixed band within which each of us fluctuate. Even an extremely sad person may have some brief spurts of happiness, the measure of which he only knows as it is usually relative to other emotions experienced by him. Similar may hold true for things like luck, love, hatred, freedom etc. More than EOQ of anything might decrease its worth, and might make it appear too costly in terms of price one has to pay. That price maybe in any form of monotony or increase in threshold level of any of the above things/ emotions or anything.

They say, excess of anything is bad. Maybe, what they want to say is that everything must be in EOQ.

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(The writer is an equation-phobic person. This is third term in course of MBA he is being taught the concept of EOQ, and yet he couldn't get the logic/ mathematics behind it. He has his end term exams and is close to failing in one subject, yet he is trying to to things other than mugging up the EOQ equation and derivation ... maybe the EOQ of studies for him is quite less !)