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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I am curious how many people are rethinking how aggressively to set up a JIT system in the wake of COVID and the supply chain issues, given it clearly cost many companies an astronomical amount of money in the end. Obviously you shouldn't build your entire company around rare, worst case scenarios, but there should probably be some consideration budgeted in for them IMO and it seems few companies were ready for rainy days.

A very very tiny (maybe not even applicable) example is how I always keep a camera or two when I buy new ones and don't sell them all off. You never know when your workhorse is going to breakdown. Just something I'm mulling over I guess!

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The rainy days were more like months for a lot of companies though. Imagine storing enough fuel in case you couldn’t get fuel for 5 months… it’s just unreasonable. It costs too much. At some point you just have to accept that you depend on a functioning world

JIT made sense for Toyota and they took steps to ensure their suppliers were beholden to them (that is they shipped whenever Toyota needed it).

JIT doesn't make sense for global supply chains when the suppliers i.e. China or Russia government can impose embargoes at will with little warning.

JIT also works really well when all your major manufacturing centers are an average 3-4 hour drive from each other. 6-8 at the furthest maybe.

JIT breaks down over global distances because “in time” and “instant” mean very different things even when moving nearly at the speed of sound. Even if no one embargoed anyone, you can’t beat the laws of physics.

Just in time doesn’t break down at all — it just calls for larger buffers

You can stream audio with a 5s delay and 10s jitter if you have a large enough buffer

JIT doesn’t mean instant. It means sizing to the first derivative (rate) and second derivative (jitter) of your f(x) (supply)

> JIT made sense for Toyota and they took steps to ensure their suppliers were beholden to them (that is they shipped whenever Toyota needed it).

Did that still hold true during the pandemic? I mean if you can't get stuff on the ships (huge part of the chain) they can't go out. It's not always a choice for suppliers as we saw.

Toyota had identified the strategic risk of chip supply some years earlier, and made sure they had access to large buffers of them, reducing the impact.

I’m not sure about the impact of shipping though.

See: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...

Sorry I don’t follow your question. The pandemic resulted in both closed factories and ships not leaving port. A double whammy for JIT.

Yeah that's what I mean - due to "the double whammy" they couldn't guarantee their deals with Toyota so it's all sort of moot, right?

I remember a chap I know, who married a Russian, and he said the Iron-Curtain Soviet ethos was, to make two of everything, so that, when one inevitably borks, the other one can be used, or cannibalized for parts.

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