Importance of JIT in Modern Organisation

Essay by stella2004cnUniversity, Master'sB-, June 2009

download word file, 12 pages 5.0

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Executive Summary

The philosophy of just-in-time (JIT) originated in Japan 50 years ago at Toyota Motor Co. The goal is to create a production environment driven by demand that holds only a small amount of inventory and products at any given time. Organizations in the manufacturing, service and public sectors are implementing a wide variety of innovative managerial tools and JIT philosophy to help them deal with the highly competitive, customer-driven environments in which they must operate. External relationships, for example with vendors and transportation carriers, become critical for effective support of JIT systems. Co-ordinate such relationships and interactions introduces additional complexity into the system. Many companies now operate in a global environment that offers both threats and opportunities to their very survival. This global environment changes at an ever increasing rate and manufacturing organisations need to be able to adapt to those changes very quickly or they will succumb to their competitors.

This paper clarifies the basic features of JIT and their benefits to organizations. The paper illustrates some advantages of using JIT system in order to emphasis the importance of adopt this system. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to advocate the JIT systems through analyse the current problems in most organizations.

Introduction

JIT manufacturing has the capacity, when properly adapted to the organisation, to strengthen the organisation's competitiveness in the marketplace substantially by reducing wastes and improving product quality and efficiency of production.

"JIT manufacturing is a philosophy by which an organization seeks continually to improve its products and processes by eliminating waste" (Ptak, 1997). It is a systems approach to reduce stock and eliminate waste, thus to produces only necessary items in necessary quantities at necessary times. It has been widely implemented in manufacturing industries as a survival strategy against global market competition. JIT...