Producing just-in-time (JIT)
Taiichi Ohno conceived JIT at Toyota as a strategy to reduce the time between when a customer placed an order until the company collected payment. To achieve this goal, the objective was, and still is, to match production rates to customer demand and eliminate all waste in activities that do not add value across the production processes.
The elimination of waste goes beyond the identification of non-value activities, to also include the elimination of raw material inventories and work in progress. Matching production capacity to demand involves pulling orders into the production operation only at the rate the facility can handle, which is effectively the rate of its slowest process.
We don't need to elaborate much further on this subject as we already discussed the application of these principles in software and systems development across many of the previous sections in this chapter, including the sections on Leveling production and Applying...
