A behavioral case study of Just‐in‐Time implementation

Abstract

A behavioral study of the just‐in‐time (JIT) situation in the circuit pack area of an electronics firm was carried out. The primary focus of the study was to examine how workers perceived JIT in their work area. A total of twelve people were interviewed—eight operators and four supervisors. The results of the study indicated that there had been many positive accomplishments, including the overall positive perception of the participants about JIT. There were, also, problems with the JIT situation, often related to the environment of the circuit pack area. Specifically, participants perceived the performance evaluation system as the most significant problem with JIT; it systematically caused a state of “push” instead of “pull.” Uncooperativeness of operators was noted by the operators themselves as a problem within the circuit pack area. It is concluded that JIT manufacturing increases the need to effectively handle problems in the organization's environment as well as within the sub‐area itself due to the lower levels of inventory. This reduction of inventory increases the interdependence of activities in the organization, thereby necessitating an efficient and effective problem‐handling capability. A discussion of why large functional organizations are less appropriate than smaller product organizations as a JIT environment is presented (e.g., effective problem handling requires increased coordination in the organizational structure, which is usually absent in large functionally designed organizations). To overcome this limitation, an organizational team approach is proposed as a temporary means of dealing with the increased interdependencies.

Reconceptualizing the effects of lean on production costs with evidence from the F‐22 program

“…To insulate against such effects, most complex, novel processes contain a variety of time, capacity, and inventory buffers. Diminishing these buffers effectively magnifies the interdependencies by increasing the ability of one task to affect another (Safayeni and Purdy, 1991). The F‐22 data provide several examples.…”

Comparative study on the relationship between just-in-time production practices and operational performance in manufacturing plants

“…The relationship between JIT production and performance of manufacturing plants has been intensively investigated in the existing literature with mixed results. While many scholars demonstrated the success of JIT implementation (Mehra and Inman 1992;Sakakibara et al 1993;McLachlin 1997;Ahmad et al 2003;Callen et al 2000;Matsui 2007), others indicated that JIT failed to improve performance (Safayeni and Purdy 1991;Inman and Brandon 1992;Wafa and Yasin 1998). We observed that previous research on JIT production provides very little explanation on why the same set of JIT production practices can produce so much different results in different plants or countries.…”

Dynamics of Conflict Between Production and Manufacturing Engineering

“…The common goal of ME and P was for process smoothness, or, minimizing variations. Safayeni and Purdy [1991], through a case study conducted in a PCBA plant, report how plant management develops new variety-handling mechanisms to replace inventories for process smoothness. At AES the general rule was that P handled technically simple routine tasks, whereas ME handled technically difficult tasks.…”