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Just-In-Time Manufacturing (JIT)

Just-In-Time

Just-In-Time is a philosophy that attempts to reduce all types of waste. While the original emphasis was on inventory, it later evolved to include all types of waste and especially time.

JIT Manufacturing may become more important as your product range and delivery volumes increase.

For instance, a traditional approach to efficiently using production capacity might be to increase batch sizes, and compensate for longer production lead times and poor supplier relations with increased stocks of finished goods and raw materials.

A JIT approach to reducing waste might see you focus on investing in setup time reduction and using much smaller batch sizes. You could invest in supplier relations to ensure that your raw materials arrive quickly and without faults. You may then be able to reduce your inventory of finished goods and raw materials whilst still maintaining short delivery times.

Like any management technique though, you need to decide how JIT fits with your long term strategy. If you are only producing a couple of bikes for markets that tolerate longer delivery cycles then you may be better off with a traditional approach to maximizing production utilization.

See Also

Developing a Long Term Strategy

The Strategic Management Process

Porter-Type Strategies

Balanced Scorecard

Total Quality Management (TQM)