Does Manufacturing Need a JIT Revolution?

Japanese companies are very, very good at manufacturing. A decade ago this was new and disturbing to Western managers. The Japanese had captured a substantial share of the U.S. automobile market, offering features, fits, and finishes at prices domestic producers were unable to match. Similar trends appeared in machine tools, copiers, and numerous other industries. Around then people began to ask: What is it the Japanese are doing right? Can we learn it too? Initially, the answers were discouraging. Knowledgeable visitors to Japan reported that the manufacturing excellence they saw there seemed rooted in the Japanese culture itself—attention to detail, individual sacrifice for collective goals, order, neatness. How could rough-cut, independent-minded Westerners hope to emulate these virtues—or want to? Then a more hopeful answer began to emerge. U.S. writers such as Richard Schonberger and Robert Hall argued that what the Japanese had actually done was develop a new approach to manufacturing management, the “Just-In-Time” (or JIT) system, which could be learned. According to Schonberger’s Japanese Manufacturing Techniques, which was published in 1982, and Hall’s Zero Inventories, which followed a year later, Japanese manufacturers had evolved concrete principles and practices: while these drew on Japanese culture in some ways, there was no reason why JIT’s methods, techniques, and procedures could not work just as well in the United States. JIT, so they wrote, represented a return to basics; it meant reducing inventories, delays, defects, and costs. It was precisely on this foundation of seemingly mundane efficiencies that Japanese companies had built their successes in global markets. The key to JIT was simplicity; it did not require expensive new equipment or complex formulas. The picture they painted was a new vision of manufacturing—a purer efficiency than managers had ever known. Small wonder, then, that JIT was enthusiastically embraced by a great many companies, including such prominent manufacturers as Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Xerox. Following in their wake have been dozens of academic symposia, many consultants, and a voluminous popular literature. Yasuhiro Monden’s Toyota Production System established itself as another early and influential work. More recently, translations of Japanese classics on JIT have started to appear, notably Taiichi Ohno’s book, also entitled Toyota Production System, and Shigeo Shingo’s A Study of the Toyota Production System. (Ohno’s and Shingo’s work at Toyota initiated the JIT movement in the first place.) Meanwhile, Schonberger and Hall have continued to explore JIT in follow-up books of their own. Nevertheless, for all the enthusiasm and literature, a storm of confusion swirls around JIT. Ask any two managers who have worked with it just what JIT is and does, and you are likely to hear wildly different answers. Some managers credit JIT with giving new life to their companies; others denounce it as a sham, telling gruesome tales of chaotic plants, furious customers, and financial wreckage. One production manager told me recently, “JIT is a joke around here, and I’m the butt of it.” Is JIT for real? If so, what is preventing some companies from realizing its promise? And why do we find such strong emotions attaching to, of all things, a system of production control? Part of the problem rests with the tone of much of the JIT literature itself, especially the U.S. literature. Many managers in the United States have found JIT elusive and rather opaque because JIT popularizers have confounded the message of manufacturing reform with an excess of zeal. In their most strident (or unguarded) moments, JIT gurus conjure a rather romantic vision of manufacturing, one that inspires readers—who are often senior managers, far removed from the factory floor—to demand wholly unrealistic goals from subordinates on the line. The danger here is that disappointed expectations will discredit real, tangible accomplishments. On Japanese Production Working for the Japanese, Joseph J. Fucini and Suzy Fucini (New York: Free Press, 1990). Zero Inventories, Robert Hall (Homewood, IL: Dow-Jones Irwin, 1983). “A Reexamination of Autonomy in Light of New Manufacturing Practices,” Janice Klein (Human Relations, Volume 43, 1990). Toyota Production System: Practical Approach to Production Management, Yasuhiro Monden (Norcross, GA: Management Press, Institute of Industrial Engineers, 1983). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, Taiichi Ohno (Cambridge: Productivity Press, 1988), translation of Toyota seisan hoshiki (Tokyo: Diamond, 1978). Just-In-Time for Today and Tomorrow, Taichi Ohno with Setsuo Mito (Cambridge: Productivity Press, 1988), translation of Naze hitsuyeo na mono o hitsuyeo na bun dake hitsuyeo na toki ni teikyeo shinia no ka (Tokyo: Diamond, 1986). Japanese Manufacturing Techniques: Nine Hidden Lessons in Simplicity, Richard Shonberger (New York: Free Press, 1982). World Class Manufacturing: The Lessons of Simplicity Applied, Richard Shonberger (New York: London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1986). Building a Chain of Customers: Linking Business Functions to Create a World Class Company, Richard Schonberger (New York: Free Press, 1990). A Study of the Toyota Production System from an Industrial Engineering Viewpoint (revised edition), Shigeo Shingo (Cambridge: Productivity Press, 1989). One finds, in other words, two very distinct messages in the JIT literature, delivered in contrasting rhetorical styles, sometimes even in the same works. On the one hand, advocates describe JIT merely as practical insights to the practical problems of factory management. On the other hand, they depict JIT as a radically new philosophy, even a culture. Call these two perspectives pragmatic JIT and romantic JIT. The Pragmatism of Patience The pragmatic version of JIT focuses on the concrete details of the production process. Every plant suffers from diverse impediments to the smooth flow of materials—including long changeover times, capacity bottlenecks, machine breakdowns, and quality defects. These “kinks” are the main causes of production delays, and inventories must be held to compensate for them. Thus JIT means using a variety of practical, down-to-earth tools to lower these obstacles. The JIT toolbox includes engineering techniques to facilitate changeovers, cleaner plant layouts, quality-control training, scheduled maintenance, simpler product designs, and much more. It is here that JIT has earned its reputation as a back-to-basics movement. Many books on the subject—especially Hall’s and Shingo’s, but also Schonberger’s—are full of drawings and diagrams illustrating in profuse detail all sorts of clever mechanical devices and organizational arrangements. The application of these tools leads to a process of continuous improvement, the accumulation of many small gains in efficiency over a sustained period of time. In this way, Ohno tells us, Toyota reduced the times of critical die-change operations from several hours to a few minutes—over the span of 25 years. In addition to production technology, JIT focuses on clear, consistent material-control procedures that respond closely to final-product demands, such as the kanban system, which uses circulating cards to drive the flow of products throughout the plant. This “demand-pull” approach is nothing new, of course, at least in principle. Shingo explains that kanban is essentially a variant of the familiar order-point system, and Ohno claims to have gotten the idea from U.S. supermarkets. But while the elements of kanban may be familiar, both Shingo and Ohno stress the need for slow, careful implementation following thorough preparation. Shingo expresses the point eloquently: “Some people imagine that Toyota has put on a smart new set of clothes, the kanban system, so they go out and purchase the same outfit and try it on. They quickly discover that they are much too fat to wear it!” And so the pragmatic case for JIT is insistent but sober. The pragmatic JIT approach, when applied patiently and judiciously, can yield substantial improvements in quality and productivity. Granted, many writers, beginning with its Japanese inventors, describe JIT as a “revolution,” but of course people use this word in different ways, in business as in politics. Pragmatic JIT certainly requires us to do things differently, but not to reshape our basic patterns of thought, nor to smash any entrenched order. The Romance of Simplicity Romantic JIT, in contrast, plays heavily on revolutionary rhetoric, beginning with a call to action: our only hope of avoiding the specter of Japanese industrial dominance is to adopt JIT ourselves, now, immediately. And against that frightening prospect, Schonberger’s Japanese Manufacturing Techniques offers a comforting message: JIT represents an aesthetic ideal, a natural state of simplicity. To implement JIT, what we need to do is to strip away needless layers of complexity. To be sure, Schonberger acknowledges that JIT may entail a long, difficult struggle. But he does not dwell on this point; the emphasis has shifted. (The name of the movement is not, after all, “Almost-InTime.”) He invites us to contemplate an image of an ideal factory, where all the obstacles have disappeared, so materials and components move in perfect synchrony. He punctuates this pleasant scenario with lyrical slogans: “Simplify, and goods will flow like water.” Indeed, Schonberger discusses production control in tones quite unlike those we have heard before. In Building a Chain of Customers, he portrays kanban as a complete departure from all earlier methods, which nevertheless is easy to implement: “Kanban is something that can be installed between any successive pair of processes in 15 minutes, using a few containers and masking tape.” In all his writings, and increasingly in the more recent books, Schonberger offers a glowing vision of the world after JIT. It leads not merely to better operations but to a complete transformation of the organization. Schonberger claims the post-JIT company enjoys high worker morale and harmonious relations with suppliers and customers, while dominating the markets for its products. And the simplicity of JIT applies not only on the factory floor but to management as well. There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, and JIT—the philosophy, as distinguished from the pedestrian tools—tells us which is which. In Building a Chain of Customers, for example, Schonberger offers a list of 19 “principles” and argues that these constitute a virtually complete guide to every sort of business decision. They include both obvious and arguable propositions—“get to know the competition,” or “seek to have plural instead of singular workstations, machines, and cells or flow lines for each product or customer family.” Companies that follow these precepts are “awake” or “enlightened.” Those that do not are “asleep.” If the need for JIT is so urgent, if its many benefits are so manifest, who has prevented us all from reaping the bounteous fruits? Like other revolutionary movements, this one casts the blame for problems, pitfalls, and shortcomings on assorted villains. The worst of these, according to Schonberger, are staff experts: “The experts get in one another’s way,” he laments in Japanese Manufacturing Techniques, “they pursue self-serving objectives, they add heavy-handed controls, their numbers grow, and they spend money.” Such people embody the complexity choking back the emergence of the JIT ideal. They should be eliminated—unless they can transform themselves into JIT facilitators. And who belongs to this obsolete class? Schonberger is fond of listing occupations we could well do without—“quality, processes, methods, maintenance, provisioning, training, safety, scheduling”—in short, virtually everyone in the production-management function. The revolution thus consumes its own. The contrast between pragmatic and romantic JIT is clearest, perhaps, in their differing interpretations of the central concept of simplicity. To say JIT entails a program of simplification is hardly to say it is simple or easy to implement. Yet that is the clear impression Schonberger conveys: “All of it is easy to understand, not hard to accept (once known), eminently teachable and learnable, and not so difficult to apply.” But simplification may be terribly hard to achieve. According to Hall: “All the companies that have given [JIT] more than lip service have experienced struggle and frustration . . .. Carrying out an integrated conversion to [JIT] is difficult.” Shingo puts it bluntly: “It took Toyota Motors twenty years to develop [JIT] fully, and others will require at least ten years to obtain satisfactory results by copying it.” Now Schonberger is no pure revolutionary. His work articulates the romantic view most forcefully, but there is plenty of pragmatism there as well. However, romantic JIT now has a life of its own. Like most radical movements, this one is the product of people browsing through books rather than reading them closely, ruminating on patches of conversation, absorbing exaggerated claims and half-believing them. In spite of the popular writers’ best intentions, loose thinking and distorted ideas get started and promulgated. Should Inventories Simply Be Cut? The most obvious danger from misunderstanding simplicity pertains to cutting inventory. The two versions of JIT suggest altogether different approaches to inventory and, correspondingly, production capacity. For revolutionaries, cutting inventory is a prompt to reform—not the result of reform. Shingo, who is a pragmatist, takes us through an elaborate analysis of a hypothetical scenario, where inventories are lowered bit by bit, following the gradual reduction of setup times, all the while keeping inventory-holding costs, risks of shortages, and production work load in balance. Shingo is also anxious to warn against an exclusive focus on small inventories: “Stock reduction should not become an end in itself, however, since cutting stock blindly may cause delivery delays or a drop in machine operating rates. Rather, the conditions that produce or necessitate stock must be corrected so that stock can be reduced in a rational fashion.” Taiichi Ohno and Setsuo Mito voice similar concerns in Just-In-Time for Today and Tomorrow: “To be sure, if we completely eliminate inventories, we will have shortages of goods and other problems. In fact, reducing inventories to zero is nonsense.” According to the revolutionaries, however, inventory has no legitimate function. Not only is it a costly symptom of imperfect operations, it impedes process improvements by covering up the obstacles to smooth flow. Thus Schonberger and others repeatedly describe inventory as wasteful, excessive, indeed “inherently evil.” The aim should be not just to reduce it but to stamp it out. As for the notion of balancing objectives, romantic JIT contemptuously dismisses it. Indeed, in Building a Chain of Customers, Schonberger proposes banning the word “trade-off’” (he calls it the “t-word”) from all discussions of inventory. Measurement, analysis, forecasting, are all, by implication, to be swept away with the influence of the staff experts. This is no joke: the vice president for manufacturing of a major electronic equipment producer told me that his company had indeed forbidden managers to use this word some years back, regarding it as evidence of insufficient zeal in pursuing the JIT ideal. (When real decisions were required, of course, various euphemisms were invented, and the ban was quietly dropped later.) Should managers induce stress on the system by reducing inventories before process improvements are undertaken? Such forced reductions, the reasoning goes, help encourage workers and managers to identify problem areas where process-improvement efforts should be focused. Actually, this technique plays a minor role in the Japanese literature, where it is mentioned briefly or not at all, and always with a clear stress on caution: inventory reductions should be small, and JIT’s process-improvement tactics should be allowed to do their work before pushing inventories down further. Along with inventory, production capacity plays a crucial but complex role in JIT. As Shingo insists, companies that try to operate with tight capacity are forced to carry substantial inventories to protect against unexpected surges in demand and other contingencies. It is just such companies that are tempted to cut back on equipment maintenance, leading to poor quality and frequent breakdowns. Indeed, companies often find that JIT means buying more and better equipment—a serious commitment of capital resources. JIT’s supporters are eager to distinguish it from robotics and similar expensive manufacturing innovations. In a chapter in World Class Manufacturing entitled “The Overstated Role of Capital,” Schonberger stresses that JIT need not require enormous capital expenditures for a new, automated plant. He may be right, but the full benefits of JIT can only be achieved with ample capacity levels. There is (pardon the expression) a trade-off between capacity and inventory, even with JIT. And JIT entails a variety of additional costs. R. Anthony Inman and Satish Mehra (Interfaces, March–April 1990) found that many small companies simply cannot afford JIT, owing to the costs of training, preventative maintenance, and, significantly, consultants. JIT may sometimes lead to quick, substantial inventory reductions at little cost with no degradation of production efficiency or customer service. But such reductions cannot be predicted in advance, and when they do occur, they are best regarded as windfalls. Once obviously wasteful inventory is eliminated, further reductions require much more effort, time, and expense. Patient Improvement and Impatient Capital If JIT revolutionaries insist on a drastic, immediate reduction of inventory, it is a safe bet corporate financial officers will too. In fact, too many companies have turned to JIT seeking fast, ostensibly painless financial surgery. Willingly or not, JIT revolutionaries have been enlisted to support the unfortunate trend of allowing short-term financial pressures to drive major operational decisions. This was brought home to me a few years ago during a discussion with the manager of a computer assembly plant. He began the conversation abruptly: “Can you tell me how to eliminate all of my work-in-process inventory in six months?” I told him no in a diplomatic way, to which he responded, “Good, then we can talk.” He proceeded to show me a memo from senior management, directing him and the firm’s other operations managers to reduce WIP to zero within six months. He had learned that this move was precipitated by a weakening in the company’s stock price; senior executives felt that something had to be done “to show we’re serious about efficiency and all that.” Also, the CFO had recently attended a JIT seminar, which had inspired him to promote inventory reductions on this massive scale. The turmoil in the financial markets over the past decade has certainly contributed to the appeal of the more radical versions of JIT. Obviously, any company concerned about the price of its shares would have a strong incentive to reduce inventories, and even more to project inventory reductions in the future. Someone planning a takeover or an LBO would also find such a concept attractive. With working capital freed up, or rather with the promise of lower working-capital requirements, more debt securities can be issued to finance the transaction. And such reductions appear even more tempting when they come easily and without new capital investment. Incidentally, if financial people are easily drawn to the appeal of radical JIT, a part of the seduction is the reports of dramatic successes studding the JIT literature. World Class Manufacturing lists 84 of them. Number 61, for example, states that Motorola’s electronic controls plant in Seguin, Texas cut inventory by 75 % and lead time by 67 % . Schonberger is careful to precede the list with a caveat: “The data are meager and cannot be used to compare one plant with another, especially since some involved high capital expenditures and others virtually none. Also, the time intervals vary.” But are readers—especially those with vested interests in such results—going to be this scrupulous? Numbers like these often seem to come in as a sort of flavoring, without any background information on costs, time frames, or changes in the industry. Some companies have achieved impressive results, no doubt. But it is important to ask how and why manufacturing reforms succeed. Capital investments nearly always play a central role, and sometimes the “successes” really shift burdens to suppliers and customers—a point I’ll get back to. Besides, many of the stories have their own peculiar twists. A leading pharmaceuticals company undertook a study of the work-in-process inventories in one of their plants as preparation for a JIT program. At most points in the plant the inventory levels were reasonable, given the current technology and work load, but in a few places inventories were unusually large. It turned out that production supervisors had accumulated inventories at these points in violation of the existing control procedures. Everyone pleaded ignorance, ruffled feathers were smoothed, and the problem was corrected immediately—resulting in a substantial WIP reduction. And this was duly recorded as the first achievement of the JIT program! Supplier Shock, Worker Stress What happens when a company does follow the revolutionary prescription? If inventories are slashed without the careful preparation envisioned by pragmatic JIT, the resulting pressures will inevitably be felt somewhere by someone. Often, this means the company’s suppliers, or its workers, or both. The dust jacket of Hall’s book proclaims that he “dispels the notion that just-in-time production is only the process of shifting inventory to the suppliers.” Well, perhaps JIT shouldn’t mean this, but it is awfully hard to determine how much “shifting” goes on in practice. It is also hard for senior management to prevent it, especially when expectations for JIT are high. I have seen JIT spawn numerous ugly confrontations between companies and their suppliers. Almost all these fights seem to arise from the same misunderstandings: if JIT is really easy, quick, and cheap, then it is natural for a company to insist on sharply reduced delivery times from suppliers. The suppliers, of course, view the matter quite differently. This was not supposed to happen. The early JIT literature assured us that such frictions would disappear, once suppliers themselves adopted the JIT system. It has not been that simple. The companies that have made JIT work on the supply end, such as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, have developed elaborate mechanisms for supplier relations, emphasizing “partnership” rather than impatient demands. But coercion remains a common mode of operation. Randy Myer of Booz Allen & Hamilton noted in “Suppliers—Manage Your Customers” (HBR, November–December 1989) that some large retailers “have unilaterally redefined relationships with their suppliers. By all accounts, they are not particularly interested in preferred supplier arrangements or supply-chain concepts. Instead, by extracting concessions and dictating terms, they determine how their suppliers will service them.” Sometimes, suppliers are able to retaliate in various damaging ways. The owner of a small specialty-steel supplier once informed me that he was a great believer in JIT, for he was getting rich charging his customers dearly for carrying their inventories—a service for which they were quite happy to pay (via price markups), as they were all under pressure from their bosses to maintain the appearance of a JIT system. The key point is that not every company can hope to dominate suppliers in the manner of Toyota. In the long run, some sort of cost sharing, whether direct or indirect, is inevitable; if a company wants JIT deliveries, it had better expect to pay for them. Incidentally, contrary to myth, things have not always gone smoothly for Toyota, either. We learn from Monden’s fascinating book that, in the early days of JIT, suppliers objected loudly to it. Eventually, the Japanese government became involved in the dispute, and Toyota was forced to revise some of its practices in the suppliers’ favor. Just as JIT may put undo pressure on suppliers, it can also create stress among workers. One of the central arguments for JIT has been that it boosts workers’ morale while enlisting their efforts in the productivity-improvement process. JIT has long been identified as part of the movement towards “employee involvement”; more recently, stronger phrases like “operator empowerment” and “ownership” have been used. The idea is that tighter inventories, shorter supply lines, quality displays, and so forth make each worker’s contributions essential to the overall operation—while providing quick, tangible feedback when problems arise. Schonberger puts it this way in Japanese Manufacturing Techniques: “We may expect (following psychologist B.F. Skinner’s principles of reinforcement) that the worker who quickly learns the effects of his workmanship will become naturally motivated to improve. With JIT in operation, there is no particular need for supervisors steeped in behavior-modification lore to provide pats on the back. The consequences of the worker’s workmanship are visible quickly . . . . and are their own reward—or penalty.” In this matter, at least, the Japanese literature tends to follow a similar tack. But there is something oddly mechanistic and theoretical about this whole approach. Only recently have some of the actual effects of JIT on the work force been examined seriously, and we are finding that they are not quite that neat and simple. For example, Janice Klein cites the experiences of a number of Japanese and U.S. companies to show that sharp reductions in inventory buffers may lead to a regimented work flow and high levels of stress among line employees. In this way JIT, or rather a too stringent version of it, can actually work against employee involvement. In “The Human Costs of Manufacturing Reform” (HBR, March–April 1989), Klein suggested a variety of remedies, including a deliberate pace of inventory reduction, both to allow workers some sense of autonomy, and to encourage their participation in broader improvement efforts: “Companies recognize the need to schedule downtime for preventative maintenance of machines. But preventative maintenance for people is just as critical.” These issues are raised in stark terms in Working for the Japanese, by Joseph and Suzy Fucini, about the Mazda factory near Detroit. This is one of the few Japanese-owned auto plants in the United States to employ a unionized work force. The UAW leadership had worked closely with Mazda from the beginning, granting a variety of work-rule and other concessions, to facilitate a Japanese-style approach to management, including JIT. In 1989, however, the UAW regulars were ousted by a slate of dissidents in a representation election, and among the key issues were the hardships imposed on the workers by Mazda’s severe version of JIT. Some of the workers’ concerns, to be sure, had little to do with JIT as we normally understand it. Management was slow to provide fans on hot days. Tools, the cheapest form of capacity, were kept in short supply. To the dissidents, however, such practices fit within a general pattern of stinginess—counterparts of the tight inventories and fast work pace associated with JIT. It is hard to know how seriously to take the events at the Mazda plant and the workers’ reading of them. (The Fucinis’ sympathies are quite obviously with the dissidents.) To some degree, certainly, JIT has been turned into one symbol among many through which UAW factions conduct their battles. Still, it is clear that if JIT is, or is perceived as, just a nice-sounding way to squeeze workers, then the companies that adopt it are headed for trouble. JIT and Marketing Strategy Demand-side issues are even more critical than the supply side. Smooth production and low inventories require an even flow of work, but JIT also requires production to respond closely to demand, which for many products fluctuates widely. There are some things a company can do to induce a more regular demand pattern. The most obvious is to consolidate the product line—make fewer models and offer fewer options. With a smaller number of products, short-term demand fluctuations will be less marked. Also, prices and rebates can be manipulated to smooth out demands somewhat. Nevertheless, demand irregularities are likely to remain. To make the JIT approach work inside the plant requires isolating the production process from demand fluctuations, and there are only two ways to do this: carry a good deal of expensive finished-goods inventory, which completely defeats the purpose of JIT, or expect customers to be satisfied with limited product availability. All this leads to a conclusion that is rarely faced squarely in the JIT literature. JIT, at least in its pure form, assumes or implies a specific marketing strategy. This strategy emphasizes low cost and high quality, while putting less weight on variety and availability. This is precisely the strategy used so successfully by the Japanese automakers in the 1970s and the early 1980s. It has also worked well in other consumer-durables markets. Something like this is what Schonberger means by the phrase “the basics as strategy.” His view is essentially that companies should focus primarily on operations and then build marketing strategy around it. He and others sometimes maintain that there is no contradiction between JIT and variety—but that presupposes the ideal, pristine JIT vision. In the real world, this is yet another trade-off. It is clear that this particular marketing strategy will not work in all markets. For example, for any product falling into the category of fashion goods, such as clothing, books, and videotapes, variety and availability are critical product attributes. The same is true of health-care and personal products. Even the big Japanese exporters, as they aim more towards luxury markets, are adopting alternative strategies. Some of Schonberger’s specific points about marketing and operations deserve attention. He notes that frequent promotions actually exacerbate demand irregularities, and too many companies ignore the resulting operational costs. Still, while production issues should play a central role in strategy formulation, marketing strategy must, after all, respond to markets. Before embarking on an extensive JIT program, a company must consider just what businesses it competes in. It does no good to pretend to be Toyota, unless you have some reasonable prospect of occupying a market position like Toyota’s. Why Raise the Temperature? We can now appreciate why JIT engenders such powerful feelings, positive and negative. In a way, this was inevitable: inventory management has always been a contentious area, for this is where the concerns—and careers—of marketing, finance, and production executives intersect. The emergence of JIT hasn’t really changed the nature of this three-way struggle, except to raise the temperature several degrees. Because JIT is such a fungible concept, managers with different priorities are free to interpret it to suit themselves. Battles over inventories have thus become even more heated than before. In particular, romantic JIT has done little to bolster the prestige of production managers. They are seen as responsible for all that useless inventory JIT promises to clean up. Does this mean we have nothing to learn from the Japanese? Of course not. But no one learns in a vacuum. As Ohno tells us, JIT was inspired in part by Western practices, but the system he created at Toyota is as Japanese as any industrial process can be. Likewise, whatever ideas we draw from Japan will end up, inevitably, with a character distinctly different from Japan’s. The critical question is, what elements of our own varied cultural traditions shall we choose to emphasize? Can we somehow channel the energy and enthusiasm tapped by romantic JIT to productive ends, while keeping our feet on the ground? I see no reason why not. In retrospect, romantic JIT and its quasi-mystical hyperbole now seem symptoms of the anxieties induced by the great wave of Japan-shock and the extraordinary financial pressures of the 1980s. To make our industries competitive again, we should indeed strive for simplicity, but let us remember that this is the most exacting of objectives. JIT requires patient effort, persistence, and meticulous care on the factory floor. Those of us who write about it had better be satisfied with the same modest virtues.

Does Manufacturing Need a JIT Revolution?

Partner Center