Dies- mold making industry in Indonesia is growing fast for supporting many industry company in Indonesia. Dies- mold is very important to production process many industry. For making plastic product, aluminum product, and steel product. In mass production industry, good quality of dies-mold is becoming major factor to reach efficiency and cost effectiveness. Good quality dies-mold can support for big batch of production and small cycle time. One of industry using dies- mold is otomotif company. Many part of otomotif using dies-mold to mass production. Some example is engine component, frame component, plastic component, exhaust system and many others. In dies mold making company, production need a large cost. Raw material is special steel, and many others grade of steel. To made dies-mold need cutting tools with very high specification. Cutting tools is being large inventory because delivery more than 2 months. Inventory is being problem because not many company in Indonesia making special tools. Tools are imported from Japan, and Europe. Company problem is using inventory is less than 50%. This mean that many waste from inventory. Lean manufacturing lead us to know that one of waste is inventory. Path analysis with Partial Least Square (PLS) is used to analize what factor is causing and high inventory. This result can lead many improvement.

Keywords : Otomotif industry, Lean manufacturing, Inventory, Partial Least Square (PLS).