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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

This is really ironic given the fact that Toyota was really at the cutting edge of 90s JIT manufacturing and this was one of worries that was raised in the. Their response, "we have multiple sources for parts." [0] But over time those multiple partners migrated to the same geographical locations, and then an earthquake hit.

[0] I'm totally paraphrasing here as I remember reading it in some magazine years ago.

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It certainly is ironic, but it is also an interesting case study for the many, many idiots who keep applying LEAN manufacturing as a dogma.

Look! See! Toyota isn't dogmatic about everything being Just In Time. They are only doing it because it is the best option at the time and it works. If it isn't the best option (or doesn't work) then they stockpile like a clever person.

There are a few people who really need their noses rubbed in to this little example.

These are the same idiots who applied Jack Welch's BS to non-manufacturing operations.

You mean rank and yank? I heard that one was a disaster for Enron and Microsoft.

For those curious that’s another name for stack ranking fire to bottom x% promote the top y%

Forcing suppliers to hold 3-6 months inventory is also a clever trick to make one look "lean".

Dell was amazing at this 10-15 years ago. They had less than 24 hours of production volume of harddisks (and other components) on their own shelves, but forced their suppliers to have them ready. Which resulted in the suppliers building warehouses close to Dell manufacturing locations, essentially offloading some of the inventory costs upstream in the supply chain. They could do that because suppliers were competing for Dell order volume. And Dell to their customers never specified the brand of the components just generic specs like 7200 rpm, 100 GB.

They famously maintained production after that earthquake. It's a common case study of how to adapt to supply chain shocks by being good at running a supply chain in the first place. All the things they needed for resilience -- plentiful data, high trust relationships with suppliers, flexible and skillful workforce -- were things they had built up to support their JIT manufacturing capability.

It's not so ironic, you can do both. What differentiates what Toyota is doing today from what Toyota did before TPS is, without understanding where the bottlenecks were in their manufacturing operations, the stockpile sizes were uncontrolled and thus only represented waste. Here, lean manufacturing principles still apply, albeit with an intent to pay a certain amount of cost to maintain a stockpile of a certain size, for BCP purposes.

Yes. No buffer is bad, and too much buffering is also bad. It's about understanding all the parameters that determine the optimal buffer size given the goals, and maintaining that optimal size.

^ today in Dyson Sphere Program tips !

At least they had it planned, and very well planned. And they still understand what JIT really meant. The actual idea and concept is now only known to Apple and Toyota. For various sort of reason ( Mostly Politics ). Others are only applying what they think they know to Supply Chains.

Most on HN would likely have little exposure to supply chain, take a look at another example coming from Toyota that anybody should have at least heard of it in Software development.

Remember Kanban board?

Holy mother of God that great idea quickly turn into a shit show.

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