JIT in services: a review of current practices and future directions for research

Introduction Just-in-time (JIT), as an operational philosophy, has been of great interest to manufacturers and researchers alike over the past decade. Toyota Motor Company is credited with developing and operating the approach. During the early 1970s, the application of this philosophy strengthened their competitiveness in the automobile industry. Other Japanese companies adopted the policy and US firms found they had lost much of their edge in manufacturing. The 1980s was catch-up time for western manufacturers. They looked closer at importing the just-in-time philosophy and researchers studied both eastern and western implementations. The literature contains a variety of definitions for the term “just-in-time”. These range from Schonberger’s (1982) “[to] produce and deliver finished goods just in time to be sold, sub-assemblies just in time to be assembled into finished goods, and purchased materials just in time to be transformed into fabricated parts”, to Hall’s (1983) “the elimination of waste in all areas of the manufacturing firm”. The American Production and Inventory Control Society defines JIT as: