Time to Forget "Just-in-Time"? Observations on a Visit to Japan.

Japan's manufacturing practices are an abiding obsession of the West. Study tours arrive almost weekly at Tokyo Narita airport, and it was one such tour that the author joined in June 1987. Nine companies were visited, ranging from conventional batch manufacture to the kind of JIT/kanban operation in automotive companies that we have all read about, and which many American and European companies are currently aspiring to imitate. Imitation was the goal for most of our party: manufacturing executives from six European countries whose companies were implementing or considering adopting JIT practices. Their professional curiosity and background knowledge of equivalent western operations gave both the plant tours and subsequent question-and-answer sessions focus, and our Japanese hosts were generous with information and English language written materials describing their systems, some of which have been adapted for the figures below. This article seeks to provide a contribution in three areas. First, to describe in detail two aspects of Japanese manufacturers not widely covered in the literature, namely their planning systems and personnel development as part of a wider company improvement initiative. Second, to relate more general impressions of both JIT and non-JIT companies, some of which reinforce and some of which contradict our received ideas about Japanese manufacture. Third, to question whether just-in-time as a concept and as a term is of continuing value, and to suggest areas which future work on Far Eastern manufacturers might investigate. Detailed comments are made on four companies, called, for reasons of confidentiality, A, B, C and D. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]