Warehouse design and management are important issues in the car trailer production as well as in other industries. There is a variety of tasks involved reaching from strategic decisions to operational implementation. This study aims to identify optimisation potentials in warehouse design and management of trailer components particularly focusing on inventory reduction and material availability. In order to determine future procurement and warehouse strategies this paper firstly presents different methods to analyse the current situation in material management. The selection of procurement strategies and the design of the procurement process are critical for improving inventory levels. The paper emphasises the determination of material requirement planning and the ordering of goods given that these functions control the supply of material and therefore influence inventory levels. Furthermore it discusses the costs and benefits of assigning responsibility for procurement and warehouse management to suppliers by introducing vendor managed inventory concepts. The findings showed that trailer components are not only purchased from suppliers but also produced in-house. Thus the paper presents possibilities to control the inventory levels of semi-finished goods. Moreover it includes a description of the physical aspects of warehouse design and points out the importance of consistent data and supporting information systems. The theoretical part of the study concludes by proposing different methods of valuing tied-up capital and the costs associated with high inventory levels. The final section of the paper explains how the theoretical approaches for optimizing the warehouse design and management can be applied in practice. A detailed analysis of Pongratz s.r.o. in Modra (Slovakia) was used for this purpose. The goal of the project was the improvement of the inventory situation in the company. Given that material planning was identified as a major driver of inventory levels, a Microsoft Excel and VBA tool was developed which facilitates the reduction of inventory and the increase of material availability by creating material requirement forecasts and by calculating order quantities and order points.