Production and storage of Inventory objects may use significant system resources, so effective system management requires appropriate policies and controls on those services and objects to minimize necessary resources. In addition to typical authorizations or permissions allowing specific users to create Inventories, such management policies may constrain when or how often Inventories may be created, what Scopes of Inventory are permitted to which users, and when Inventory objects should be deleted.

For instance, an organization that uses Inventory SOP Instances for safety backup (see Section YYYY.5.2), may have policies to create a complete Inventory each month, to maintain the two most recent Inventories, and automatically delete prior ones. Such a policy would allow the assignment of a value for Expiration DateTime (0008,0416) for the Inventory SOP Instances.

An organization might set a shorter retention period for Inventory SOP Instances associated with a canceled Inventory creation request.

A system that supports the Inventory Creation SOP Class (see Section YYYY.3.2) might reject requests that duplicate the scope of an Inventory recently created and that is available through the Inventory Query/Retrieve Service. A system that produces a regular full Inventory, e.g., monthly, might allow Inventory Creation requests only with a Study Update DateTime (0008,041F) range after the last full Inventory Content Date (0008,0023) / Content Time (0008,0033).