Just In Time, Just Enough

I've been thinking about Stockpiles, which led to Supply Chains, which led to ...

Just in Time supply chains.

And in the spirit of , "If a Mouse Asks You for a Cookie"...

Led to..... a google search

The Just in Time logistic philosophy is a profit maximizing scheme that is in keeping with the best traditions of VooDoo Economics (as coined by George HW Bush, or Bush the First).

Unfortunately, it has to work precisely as required to be truly cost effective and efficient. Wise companies build in plenty of redundancy and multiple suppliers but doing so does cut into profit.

Here's an interesting look from "The Maritime Executive", I would guess not a socialist libtard publication published on March 20, 2020.

www.maritime-executive.com...

Covid-19, yada, yada....

In practical terms, this means we should be keeping larger inventories and

promoting a greater degree of regional self-sufficiency.

These measures will help ensure that our communities don’t panic if the food deliveries stop.

Now for the scary part....

Take the systems that produce and distribute the corn, wheat and rice that fuel most of humanity’s calories.
The latest United Nations report on the global grain system contains some bad news.

Last year, the world ate more grains than it produced within the year, and our carryover stocks (defined as the amount of food we have, globally, at the end of the year to see us through to the next harvest) are declining.

More detail and ....

But what if Mother Nature doesn’t play nice with us this year?

Climate change, after all, is making food harder to produce.

What if we face a major drought in Europe and Asia like we did in 2010 to 2011? Or another big drought in America’s Midwest similar to the situation in 2012 and 2013? And what if COVID-19 doesn’t go away by summer?

If any of these things happen, we may not have the buffers to protect ourselves.

And it won’t be toilet paper and hand sanitizer we need to worry about. It might be wheat, rice and corn.

Something to think about y'all.

A bit of information from another pro-Capitalist site:

www.investopedia.com...

The benefits of the just-in-time (JIT) production strategy are well-documented, but it can also have some serious disadvantages.

The chief issue with this production process is evidenced in its name. "Just in time" means that the success of this business strategy depends largely on precise coordination between businesses and their suppliers to ensure prompt delivery.

Because there is no inventory buffer, business can suffer greatly if any one element of production is delayed.

That sounds like cooperation is needed - not a strong suit of free market capitalists. Though they have been observed in the wild to come together quite effeciently to feast at the corpse of a competitor.

A touch of historial context - not that anyone believes history. From 1996:

A weeklong strike against two Ohio brake plants has crippled the world's largest carmaker and left scores of suppliers and trucking companies throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico with no choice but to shut down or drastically scale back operations.

www.joc.com...

So we turn to current events, and bring the subject full circle:

The problem was unrelated to the novel coronavirus, and in any other time, it would have been a small hiccup on the way to finding replacement gowns.

But then, as the virus surged, so did demand for gowns, both in and out of China, leaving Watkins and his colleagues scrambling. “This is probably as bad as I’ve seen it,” he said in a phone interview.

We’ve built a global supply chain that runs on outsourcing and thin margins, and the coronavirus has exposed just how delicate it is.

“I guess we’ve done a good enough job within the health-care supply chain of getting pricing down to the point that the vendors don’t have a lot of extra margin or slack to play with,” Watkins said. So when demand spikes, everyone feels it.

www.theatlantic.com...

The moral of the story - giving a mouse a cookie leads down mammoth rabbit hole.

These are lessons for the youth to remember when they get older and are told that globalism is the answer.

originally posted by: AutomateThis1
These are lessons for the youth to remember when they get older and are told that globalism is the answer.

Sorry... All the youth care about these days is learning to count all the genders.

a reply to: IredBafi

Don't write them all off. I know quite a few younger peoole who can see through the BS. They're just as angry as some of us that they have to live in a world where they feel they are being coerced to use social media to even have friends. They're mad that their parents pushed Youtube into their faces as children instead of actually parenting. They aren't buying into the government and media fear.

As long as their are people like that I thinknit's possible for us to get things back on the right track.

a reply to: FyreByrd

I seem to recall reading up on ''just in time'' back in the eighties and how American business sought to emulate this Japanese model of business. This was all under Reagan when corporations in the US did not think they were maximizing their profits. This along with of course his deregulating so many of the laws that they did not like at the time went hand in hand with the ''trickle down'' theories that promised so much in the way of work for the middle class. righto...

a reply to: AutomateThis1
Not sure how you got that from the OP.

Lets say the US completely isolates and everything consumed in the US is grown/made in the US. If a system like JIT is used you would need stockpiles. If the populace depletes the stockpiles and nature throws a whammy in the production you will have shortages, because there is nothing to take up the slack for the low production in that year.

It really has nothing to do with globalism.

a reply to: daskakik

ok

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

At the time American automakers were getting creamed by the Japanese comp. They tried whatever they could to emulate them and their success. I think NUMMI was a great product of that.

originally posted by: daskakik
a reply to: AutomateThis1
Not sure how you got that from the OP.

Lets say the US completely isolates and everything consumed in the US is grown/made in the US. If a system like JIT is used you would need stockpiles. If the populace depletes the stockpiles and nature throws a whammy in the production you will have shortages, because there is nothing to take up the slack for the low production in that year.

It really has nothing to do with globalism.

Stockpiles (Inventories) are the antithesis of Just in Time where the whole point is to not carry inventories.

a reply to: FyreByrd
I guess I read it wrong as well.

The take away, no matter what, is that stockpiles are a good idea.

JIT would fail when/if nature introduced a whammy, regardless of things being globalized or not.

a reply to: daskakik
It's not quite as simple as that. Food stuff can only be warehoused in for short terms, even 'preserved' foods need to be regularly rotated out. Even so called durable goods have a limited shelf life, such as (who knew) nuclear weapons.

I fear the arts of warehousing are a lost art.

a reply to: FyreByrd

Fair enough, but is it really a lost art or is it just less profitable?

I think it is as simple as that, JIT will fail if/when something interrupts the flow.