If you have any involvement in supply chain you know it is broken….maybe irretrievably. Forgive me if I say it out loud: R.I.P. to J.I.T.
For those who don’t get the acronyms, (don’t you just love being in the know, and just hate it when you have no idea what the acronym is for?) It means rest in peace to just in time.
Just in time inventory replacement is a thing of pure beauty in action. It is more beautiful than that sleek many-tone Porsche I saw in Newport Beach last week. It is more beautiful than that elite runner with the perfect body I swivel headed to follow on the boardwalk. To have exactly the right amount of inventory coming just when you need it creates efficiencies, profits and happy team members from the CEO to the line, to the warehouse to the customers. It is a virtuous cycle. It is a thing of beauty.
It is gone.
Due to the pandemic, we have painful and costly disruptions everywhere in the supply chain. CEO’s are dropping everything to find a critical component. We thought that would be temporary and we would soon go back to the days when a few team members could manage inventory. Not so. Like many things we took as normal, like working in an office, this may have changed forever. Just in time may never be coming back.
What does this mean for you? Grieve what used to be, briefly, then get real about the long term change. It will continue to take more time to source and it will continue to be more complicated. Hire or reassign staff so senior leadership isn’t jumping in to do the firefighting. Pay attention to sourcing as a critical success factor. Those who have great sourcing win. Those who have the right inventory win. And, as always, those who have cash win.