preview

Just-in-Time Inventory Management

Better Essays

Just-in-Time is an inventory management philosophy that aims to reduce inventories by implementing systems and processes to supply a product or service exactly when it is needed, and how it is needed in the production process. The concept of JIT is widely accepted today by many American manufacturing companies, and it is a means of controlling costs through striving to maintain lean inventories—in fact, the concept of JIT was introduced in the early 1980’s to the U.S. as a concept know as “zero inventories”. This inventory control concept involves close relationships with vendors or suppliers, who are able to provide components of the product direct to the work-in-process area, in a “pull” type fashion, whereby the components are …show more content…

Considering the fact that the shifting of inventory from the hospital to the supplier is going to raise the supplier’s inventory level, it is reasonable to conclude that the supplier might raise their rates. In addition, if JIT systems are not managed properly, they inherently raise the risk of stock outages of inventory—in the health care environment, medical supply outages can be life threatening.
The second article discussed is titled, “Just-In-Time Inventory Management: Implementation of a Successful Program”, from a 1995 edition of Review of Business. This article describes the basic process of implanting JIT in an organization, and provides an excellent summary of the management philosophy in general, however, it concludes with a similar cautionary note to the first article. To begin, this article discusses the three basic stages of JIT: Kanban systems, Production planning, and Global management philosophy. Each stage is more advanced than the prior, and the article notes that any organization utilizing any of these levels of JIT, describes itself as a JIT based company.
The Kanban, derived from the Japanese words kan (card), and ban (signal), is the most basic form of JIT. The Kanban is a materials movement tracking

Get Access