The Idea of Just in Time

The Idea of Just in Time

The idea of Just In Time originated in Japan. Actually this type of inventory/production was originally known as the "Toyota Production System". A man by the name of Taiichi Ohno is credited as the person who first came up with this system. He looked at the Western industries and found that the manufacturers would set up their manufacturing lines to produce a large quantity of one product before stopping and and switching to a different product. They also would order and stock an overabundance of inventory so that the right parts were always on hand.

Ohno did not feel that this would not work in a nation that demanded a smaller quantity but a greater variety to its products. So he came up with an innovative system of production that was based on the idea of eliminating waste. This system eliminated waste by only have items brought to the production line in the amount they needed and only when needed. He also came up with a system that used more machines than people. People were used only when the machines detected an error and then the system would stop until the problem had been corrected. This system is known now as “automation”. In this system having too much stock was seen as being a waste.

A number of things that contribute to waste include:

· overproduction - waste from producing more than is needed

· time spent waiting - waste such as that associated with a worker being idle whilst waiting for another worker to pass him an item he needs (e.g. such as may occur in a sequential line production process)

· transportation/movement - waste such as that associated with transporting/moving items around a factory

· processing time - waste such as that associated with spending more...

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...introduction of their new production system. Although, obviously, as the originators of the approach Toyota had much to learn and no doubt made mistakes, this illustrates the time that can be required to successfully implement a JIT system in a large company. Moreover you can reflect on the management time/effort/cost that was consumed in the development and implementation of their JIT system.

With respect to the Western world JIT only really began to impact on manufacturing in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Even then it went under a variety of names - e.g. Hewlett Packard called it "stockless production". Such adaptation by Western industry was based on informal analysis of the systems being used in Japanese companies. Books by Japanese authors (such as Ohno himself) detailing the development of JIT in Japan were not published in the West until the late 1980's.