Just-in-time - Its Fingerprint on Structures in Production Systems

In recent years, improvements in production systems have become more and more important. The Just-In-Time philosophy has been an important contributor. But what has happened to JIT since the ‘JIT-crusade’ carried out in the late 1980s in USA. This paper describes how three authors in the early 1980s saw JIT at Toyota. This description is hold up agains Hayes and Wheelwright’s ramework with eight decision categories, and by this it is seen where differences exist, and what the implications has been for present days production systems. This paper, though, is only the first half of a complete study of this subject, so the preliminar conclusions are that JIT in the early 1980s was a philosophy, which now is ‘reduced’ to a number of elements which contains methods to improve certain parts of companies production systems.