Factory downtime is the single biggest cost a manufacturing shop can incur. No amount of working capital savings from carrying fewer screws, widgets, and bolts can offset the costs of taking 14 plants down due to penny wise, pound foolish math.
Please provide a citation for how JIT manufacturing cost TM "far more than it saved them"?
I do not have any skin in on the game as to how effective or not JIT is, but wouldn’t the correct question be, how did Toyota fair vs non-JIT companies? As GP was implying, JIT is fine day-to-day, but can make failure conditions worse.
that's how it saves you far more than it can cost you through such a quite unique event as the one of this news article.
controlling JIT was originally done with little "kanban" paper slips, which pulled in the next batch of work. those are the origin of software "kanban", too, the software engineering "pull" workflow.
Reducing the amount of parts on hand saved them money and made them more efficient.