Essay on JIT manufacturing

This paper is meant to identify the key ingredients that make JIT work. Today, faced with the labor dearth, many companies turned to human resources management principle, which cuts expenses and guarantees just the right quantity of highly skilled workers to get all the tasks done. Human resources management may resolve the latent time bomb, allowing organizations to competently organize a lessening skilled work force and to manage the fluctuations in the businesses.

For instance, due to cyclical demand for the products, a producer of audio systems experienced a trouble when the increasing amount of orders prompted a growth from 2 production lines to 6. Whilst more employees could have been employed to keep pace with the new demand, the requirement to lessen the personnel during “valleys” in manufacture would evolve substantial employment and re-training expenses, not to mention ethic troubles prompted by the vision of dismisses. The firm responded by requiting flexible employees to increase permanent personnel. Every new worker was hired, taught in certain job requirements, and made accessible to start a job right away. The additional work force has added to enhanced output and reduced human and administrative resources burdens for the plant.

The human resources management principle was utilized by this company during the JIT manufacturing. JIT manufacturing is an approach to evolving a manufacturing system. And it is based on the entire removal of waste. It is not a novel idea. JIT manufacturing requires that equipment, labor and sources are made accessible only in the quantity required and at the time required to do the work. It is actually based on creating merely the necessary units in the needed quantities at the needed time by bringing production rates accurately in line with the current market demand. It is so effective that it augments output, product quality and work performance, whilst preserving costs (Raia, 1988).

A “secret” to the flourishing JIT process is guarantying everyone is actually involved; it is called “people involvement” (Johnson, Kaplan, 1987). Any person, who is a member of the production-of-business cycle, should be involved. This implies every person – from the gatekeeper at the organization that is executing JIT to the board of directors. It means the firm’s suppliers of materials and products. It means the trucking organization that delivers products to be sold or materials to be processed (Isaac, 1987).

Today the JIT approach should be taking a form; when a business has a notion of what the demand for its goods or services is, the supply chain, the manufacturing process and a delivery chain may be created. Only when these factors are acknowledged may JIT be put into the place. Then manufacturing materials arrive at the instant they are needed in an assembly process, whilst there is practically no time lost between the steps in manufacturing. The immediate production is finished, the prepared product is shipped. Naturally, it is the perfect situation. But with correct planning and execution, this ideal may be accomplished.

The tendency toward human resources management principle is similar to just-in-time inventory management approaches accepted over the past ten years. Just as organizations plan to manufacture just the quantity of products they have to distribute at any one time, human resources management principle enables them to arrange the appropriate number of employees to execute an assignment at any one time (Quinn, Harrington, 1987).

A novel order is emerging on the international economic scene. Organizations, which tie together their human resources to optimal benefit, will obviously prosper as international economies restart development. Innovative employment management practices may go a long way to restore efficiency and contain costs.