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This special feature addresses the very critical matter of how a company should determine its service-level targets, or the probability that no shortages occur between the time you order more stock of the item and when it arrives on the shelf. The two articles in this section—Tom Willemain’s Choosing and Achieving a Target Service Level and Shaun Snapp’s How Should a Company Set Service Levels? Perception vs. Reality—show that problems in setting proper targets lie in (a) the inherent complexity of the challenge; (b) unrealistic modeling assumptions; (c) difficulties in implementing software applications that model the relationships between service levels and inventory costs; and, perhaps most tellingly, (d) the reliance in many companies on misperceptions about service-level goals and misalignment across functional areas on what the targets should be.