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...

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...

In this paper, we consider discrete event systems divided in a main system and a secondary system such that the inner dynamics of each system is ruled by standard synchronizations and the interactions between both systems are expressed by partial synchronizations (i.e., event e2 can only occur when, not after, event e1 occurs) of events in the secondary system by events in the main system. The ...