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by archildress 1020 days ago
Just-in-time will cost you far more than it will save you. The problem is that when it fails, you judge those failures as "backwards looking one offs" as opposed to a cost that is part and parcel to being JIT.

Factory downtime is the single biggest cost a manufacturing shop can incur. No amount of working capital savings from carrying fewer screws, widgets, and bolts can offset the costs of taking 14 plants down due to penny wise, pound foolish math.
4 comments
davedx 1020 days ago
It would be nice if you could back that up with some facts, considering Toyota has been using some variant of this system since 1948.

Please provide a citation for how JIT manufacturing cost TM "far more than it saved them"?

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0cf8612b2e1e 1019 days ago
Bad business practices can survive for a long time.

I do not have any skin in on the game as to how effective or not JIT is, but wouldn’t the correct question be, how did Toyota fair vs non-JIT companies? As GP was implying, JIT is fine day-to-day, but can make failure conditions worse.

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froh 1020 days ago
the benefit of JIT is to detect problems early. If you minimize the number of parts "in flight" you minimize the time between creating defective parts and detecting the defects and taking countermeasures. any stockpile hides systematic production issues in the stockpiled parts until the part has percolated through the stockpile.

that's how it saves you far more than it can cost you through such a quite unique event as the one of this news article.

controlling JIT was originally done with little "kanban" paper slips, which pulled in the next batch of work. those are the origin of software "kanban", too, the software engineering "pull" workflow.

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wil421 1020 days ago
A family member worked for a large military aerospace company. In the 80s they were building a system to order parts and tell the factory what to produce and complete daily so airplane production was maximized. He said they had so many parts employees said they used JIC or Just In Case.

Reducing the amount of parts on hand saved them money and made them more efficient.

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hotstickyballs 1020 days ago
Fortunately Japanese (or generally Asian) culture makes it the individuals responsibility if things fail so corporate is safe as usual
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