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Just in Time a historical

Just in Time a historical 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 time than is necessary processing an item on a machine · inventory - waste associated with keeping stocks · defects - waste associated with defective items At the time car prices in the USA where typically set using selling price = cost plus profit mark-up. However in Japan low demand meant that manufacturers faced price resistance, so if the selling price is fixed how can one increase the profit mark-up? Obviously by reducing costs and hence a large focus of the system that Toyota implemented was to do with cost reduction. To aid in cost reduction Toyota instituted production levelling - eliminating unevenness in the flow of items. So if a component which required assembly had an associated requirement of 100 during a 25 day working month then 4 were assembled per day, one every two hours in an eight hour working day. Levelling was also applied to the flow of finished goods out of the factory and to the flow of raw materials into the factory. Toyota changed their factory layout. Previously all machines of the same type, e.g. presses, were together in the same area of the factory. This meant that items had to be transported back and forth as they needed processing on different machines. To eliminate this transportation different machines were clustered together so items could move smoothly from one machine to another as they were processed. This meant that workers had to become skilled on more than one machine - previously workers were skilled at operating just one type of machine. Although this initially met resistance from the workforce it was eventually overcome. Whilst we may think today that Japan has harmonious industrial relations with management and workers working together for the common good the fact is that, in the past, this has not been true. In the immediate post Second World War period, for example, Japan had one of the worse strike records in the world. Toyota had a strike in 1950 for example. In 1953 the car maker Nissan suffered a four month strike - involving a lockout and barbed wire barricades to prevent workers returning to work. That dispute ended with the formation of a company backed union, formed initially by members of the Nissan accounting department. Striking workers who joined this new union received payment for the time spent on strike, a powerful financial inventive to leave their old union during such a long dispute. The slogan of this new union was "Those who truly love their union love their company". In order to help the workforce to adapt to what was a very different production environment Ohno introduced the analogy of teamwork in a baton relay race. As you are probably aware typically in such races four runners pass a baton between themselves and the winning team is the one that crosses the finishing line first carrying the baton and having made valid baton exchanges between runners. Within the newly rearranged factory floor workers were encouraged to think of themselves as members of a team - passing the baton (processed items) between themselves with the goal of reaching the finishing line appropriately. If one worker flagged (e.g. had an off day) then the other workers could help him, perhaps setting a machine up for him so that the team output was unaffected. In order to have a method of controlling production (the flow of items) in this new environment Toyota introduced the kanban. The kanban is essentially information as to what has to be done. Within Toyota the most common form of kanban was a rectangular piece of paper within a transparent vinyl envelope. The information listed on the paper basically tells a worker what to do - which items to collect or which items to produce. In Toyota two types of kanban are distinguished for controlling the flow of items: · a withdrawal kanban - which details the items which should be withdrawn from the preceding step in the process · a production ordering kanban - which details the items to be produced All movement throughout the factory is controlled by these kanbans - in addition since the kanbans specify item quantities precisely no defects can be tolerated - e.g. if a defective component is found when processing a production ordering kanban then obviously the quantity specified on the kanban cannot be produced. Hence the importance of autonomation (as referred to above) - the system must detect and highlight defective items so that the problem that caused the defect to occur can be resolved. Another aspect of the Toyota Production System is the reduction of setup time. Machines and processes must be re-engineered so as to reduce the setup time required before processing of a new item can start. Ohno has written that Toyota was only able to institute kanbans on a company wide basis in 1962, ten years after they first embarked on the 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 Bibliography:

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