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just in time; logistics just in time
It is over 60 years old, but it is still the object of desire and the ideal of many supply chains across the globe. The Just in Time philosophy (‘Just in Time’ in English) pursues an objective that is easy to state but more difficult to achieve: having the exact amount of material (whether raw materials or finished products) in the right place and at the right time . Its origin comes from Japan after World War II, with the Toyota brand at the forefront of this revolution. The idea behind just in time (JIT) is, by eliminating stocks, making the entire production process more efficient, optimizing costs and being…
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How to match demand to supply
The balance between demand and supply is as delicate as it is a critical issue in supply chains. Logisticians around the globe are well aware of the savings that can be achieved by maintaining this balance, and of the disasters that can occur when one of the two is far superior to the other. Last week we saw how we can try to optimize supply to meet demand. In this article we are going to turn the tables and collect some of the methods used to ensure that the demand is the one that adapts to the supply capacity that we have (either by having less supply than we would…
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Heijunka or the leveling of production
Lean Manufacturing is one of the great manufacturing models of today and we have already talked about it on several occasions. Today we are going to stop at one of the bricks that usually make up the Lean manufacturing and Just in Time building: the Heijunka. This technique of Japanese origin, which can be translated as production leveling, is created to try to mitigate the effects of variations in demand in the production chain. This leveling refers to a more balanced production among numerous SKUs, instead of dealing with large quantities of the same SKU until moving on to the next, within a usually smaller number of SKUs. Why Heijunka?…
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