Though increasing usage of just-in-time (JIT) practices is reported, academics—including Shapiro at Harvard Business School, Karmarkar at UCLA (Anderson) and Cusumano at MIT (Sloan)—as well as a number of practitioners have warned against the unrestricted pursuit of just-in-time practices. They suggest that pure JIT is appropriate only for limited economic environments, that it is ineffective i...

Studies of sick pay and absenteeism have traditionally treated absence as a worker-related phenomenon. There are good reasons to suppose, though, that firms’ incentives to control absenteeism are not uniform. This paper presents what we believe to be the first evidence for relationships between the nature of a firm’s production method ) and its personnel policies, particularly as they are direc...

This paper concerns the modeling of low inventory lines. Currently, most models assume that processing times are independent. We consider the differences in behavior of workers in lowand high-inventory production lines. Using a laboratory experiment we show that workers speed up when they are the cause of idle time on the line. This means that processing time distributions are not independent o...

Recently Just-In-Time (JIT) production has attracted increasing interest throughout the Chinese manufacturing industries and its programs have been widely implemented. Currently, there are few studies conducted about JIT manufacturing implemented by small manufacturing firms in China, even though small firms are still dominant in many areas of manufacturing industries in China. This study analy...

This paper implements the inventory model developed in the first part of this paper in a simplified problem to simultaneously reduce costs and risks in JIT systems. This model is developed to ascertain an optimal ordering strategy for procuring raw materials by using regular multi-external and local backup suppliers to reduce the total cost of the products, and at the same time to reduce the ri...

In this paper, we deal with a supply chain in which an assembler orders parts from a supplier. The assembler decides both order size and lead time for the supplier. In response, the supplier will determine its production capacity to fulfill the order from the assembler. Compared with the case where the assembler and the supplier maximize their own individual profits, the supply chain coordinati...

Since the early 1980’s, when Japanese manufacturing firms in a number of industries—including auto, electronics, and machinery—achieved high levels of international competitiveness, Japanese manufacturing practices—particularly those associated with just-in-time manufacturing (JIT)—have attracted considerable attention in North America. Transfer to the United States of JIT is characterized by s...

Appropriate scheduling and sequencing of tasks on machines is one of the basic and significant problems that a shop or a factory manager encounters with it, this is why in recent decades extensive researches have been done on scheduling issues. A type of scheduling problems is just-in-time (JIT) scheduling and in this area, motivated by JIT manufacturing, this study investigates a mathematical ...

This paper addresses the integrated scheduling and lot-sizing problem in a manufacturing environment which produces complex assemblies. Given the due-dates of the end items, the objective is to minimize the cumulative lead time of the production schedule (total makespan) and reduce set-up and inventory holding costs. A JIT production strategy is adopted in which production is scheduled as late ...