Just-in-Time Under Fire: The Five Major Constraints Upon JIT Practices

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 in some organizational cultures, that it is unattainable by many small suppliers, and that, in practice, it does not truly reduce an organization’s total/global costs. Such constraints are typically overlooked in descriptions of JIT philosophy. Accordingly, this paper originates, through an examination of the academic and popular literature, five major constraints regarding just-in-time philosophy toward future use in such descriptions: customer-driven & economic conditions, logistics, organizational culture & conditions, intractable accounting & finance practices, and small supplier difficulties.