Introduction
In today’s competitive world shorter product life cycles, customers rapid demands and quickly changing business environment is putting lot of pressures on manufacturers for quicker response and shorter cycle times. Now the manufacturers put pressures on their suppliers. One way to ensure quick turnaround is by holding inventory, but inventory costs can easily become prohibitive. A wiser approach is to make your production agile, able to adapt to changing customer demands. This can only be done by JUST IN TIME (JIT) philosophy. JIT is both a philosophy and collection of management methods and techniques used to eliminate waste (particularly inventory).
Waste results from any activity that adds cost without adding value, such as moving and storing. Just-in-time (JIT) is a management philosophy that strives to eliminate sources of such manufacturing waste by producing the right part in the right place at the right time.
Features
JIT (also known as lean production or stockless production) should improve profits and return on investment by reducing inventory levels (increasing the inventory turnover rate), reducing variability, improving product quality, reducing production and delivery lead times, and reducing other costs (such as those associated with machine setup and equipment breakdown).
The basic elements of JIT manufacturing are people involvement, plants, and system. People involvement deal with maintaining a good support and agreement with the people involved in the production. This is not only to reduce the time and effort of implementation of JIT, but also to minimize the chance of creating implementation problems. The plant itself also has certain requirements that are needed to implement the JIT, and those are plant layout, demand pull production, Kanban, self-inspection, and continuous improvement. The plant layout mainly focuses on maximizing working flexibility. It requires the