Toyota’s Jit Concept: Other Industries, Other Countries

Summary

The Just-in-Time production system (JIT) is well known to result in a considerable cost reduction and improvement in total productivity in many types of manufacturing companies. Its applications in the past, however, have made manufacturers disinclined to use it, because its introduction seemed to require a great change in their management concept. The first investigation reported in this paper was devoted to whether and to what extent the JIT concept has actually been applied to industries other than the automobile industry and in other countries than Japan. Next, a hypothetical application of JIT to the food-processing industry is proposed. The main conclusions were (1) JIT can be partially introduced in production management to solve a/some specific problem/s; (2) when JIT is applied outside the automobile industry, its form might become drastically different; (3) The success or the failure of adopting JIT outside Japan vill depend primarily on the human factor; and (4) JIT is a mirror of the present system in which the Japanese worker is educated.