[Spooky23]

JIT is a boogeyman in some cases. Ultimately it doesn’t make sense to stockpile parts most of the time for financial and other reasons. If Intel had a warehouse of 1Gb chips, they would have a disincentive to invest in 10Gb, for example.

The dysfunction is the accounting games that companies are incentivized to keep stuff off of their books. Every company wants to look like a software company and avoid stuff like inventory. Some of this is absurd - many companies don’t “own” property, for example, they lease through entities that are sometimes only nominally separate.

Sometimes companies will outsource processes and fulfillment to layers of other entities, each of which do the same thing. Disruptions cascade - I had one issue last year where a supplier’s supplier had issues getting boxes, and a two week delay there delayed downstream fulfillment by 6 weeks. All because the people who ship the end product couldn’t deliver, and the “principal” outsourced the actual management of the process to a third party. If the principal controlled it, they would have gotten it done, as they were punished severely by the contract penalties. They bet on everything working out ok and lost.

[laumars]

Ironically the biggest two IT companies in the world, Apple and Amazon, are ones that go out of their way to control the entire supply chain.