[froh]

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.