I guess 18 months of doing the extremely heavy lifting for the whole industry has taken its toll and now they're in the same boat.
Basically if a part can only be produced by one or two parties there is too much risk of that source going away and disrupt everything else. This also applies all the way down the chain so if you got part A that can be made by 20 contractors but if all of those contractors depend on the same source then that part is also on the list of "stockpile this part enough to get over most disruptions"
We tried to order 100 and were told the lead time was 36 weeks. We got through it with existing stock, scrounging displays from dead boards. Buying different displays and replacing the backlights. Small orders of 10 here, 15 there. And pushing a few customers out a month or two.
1) https://www.ntotank.com/blog/resin-material-market-shortages... 2) https://www.wsj.com/articles/supply-chain-bottlenecks-drive-...
Instead you either stop/slow production or shove them in your products and hope for the best.
JIT, in Lean, does not mean no buffer, it means as little of a buffer as you can get away with. If you have issues with delivery like this on a regular basis, then you'd increase the buffer size (at least temporarily) and also take your suppliers to task for sending the wrong thing over and over.
The buffer size should be increased if any upstream supply issues exist that regularly cause a shortage. Ideally, you should address those issues themselves, but if you have and they can't (or won't) be fixed then you increase your buffer to accommodate reality. However, the shortage is itself a signal. Too high an inventory permits supply issues to persist without being addressed for a long time because you never get the signal about the issues with them (the downstream production slowdowns).
Yeah, spot on. One of my college professors used to compare it to a river with rocks in it. If you want to safely sail on the river, you can either a) keep the water level high enough or b) remove the rocks. In a production system inventories/buffers are the water level and variance is the rocks. The philosophy of JIT is to remove as much variance from your system as possible so you can lower your buffers. If you have identified areas of high variance you're forced to keep buffers until you've removed enough variance to lower your buffers.
Eh... I would argue that JIT means making that buffer someone else's problem.
I was doing EDI at a logistics firm that contracted with Seagate who provided HDDs to Hitachi for their SANs around 2006. Hitachi was doing JIT for their manufacturing, Seagate however was just speculating Hitachi's demand and literally stockpiled HDDs in this firms warehouses geolocated next to Hitachi's factories.
We would pickup stock from Seagate and ship it to these warehouses where they would remain Seagate's property until Hitachi requested it, then we would simply transfer ownership to Hitachi.
Interestingly, we used rail shipping as a buffer to reduce warehouse size by sending freight on slow/cheap/indirect routes.
If Hitachi couldn't consume your delivered HDDs as fast as they were delivered and anticipated any kind of delay/disruption could ever happen, they'd have some buffer of their own.
The logistics firm was the buffer allowing Seagate's product rate and Hitachi's consumption to be asymmetric in nature.
EDIT: What you describe sounds more like VMI, vendor managed inventory, than JIT. Both require half way reliable forecasts and collaborative planning so to worl properly. Have to agree so that both solutions tend to push inventory risk to suppliers. Done correctly, overall inventory does decrease so.
The interesting thing was that Seagate avoided managing inventory by outsourcing to the logistics firm. The stock was technically Seagate's until it was ordered by Hitachi but the logistics company took immediate possession as pallets rolled out of the factory.
> The last bit works, as long as the slow transportation is closely controlled.
It didn't need to be controlled, just scheduled. You knew you need x units by d. The factory output n per week, so you could stagger shipments by way of different lines.
All of the inventory was tracked by serial numbers and it was interesting to watch it move because supply was often delivered to the warehouse out of order or shipments weeks apart arrived simultaneously.
Toyota and a lot of the concepts that come out of Toyota are ideals to strive for. It doesn’t mean everything is like that, which is hard to understand from just reading the lean literature.
No they don't, automotive semiconductors suppliers have an "obligation" to manufacture the component for at least 15 years, which makes managing the production output planning, spare parts etc. much easier. It's not like walking into your supermarket and finding out that your favorite brand of chocolate is no longer available. There are minor exceptions, and sudden changes in the demand might affect the immediate availability, but at the very least the part is almost guaranteed to be produced for 15 years with defined notice policies. Microcontrollers don't have a pin-compatible drop in replacement when they get discounted, but many different ICs do, like power supplies, transistors etc., so discounting them is not a big deal.
e.g.: https://www.nxp.com/products/product-information/nxp-product...
> Participating products are available for a minimum of 10 years from product launch (15 years from product launch for many products developed for the automotive, telecom and medical segments), and are supported by standard end-of-life notification policies.
Think of each stage of the system, not just the components you bring in but also the partially assembled components you produce along the way as well as the finished product. US auto manufactures (in particular) had an operating method where they kept inventories high at all stages. This wasn't entirely deliberate. They weren't saying, "We need 5000 car doors just sitting here." They were, instead, saying, "We can't stop making doors just because everything else down the line is stopped due to <event> so keep churning them out and pile them up." The tail end inventory of "complete" vehicles were sitting there due, often, to quality issues (misaligned assemblies, missing parts, whatever the reason may be).
So inventory piles up everywhere along the chain, which also worked because there was a large turnaround period when retooling and equipment downtime (not always planned). Because Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Problems that Never Happened [0] there was an underinvestment in maintenance and improvement efforts. High inventory across the line papers over this issue. Lean discourages high inventory in order to make these issues apparent so that they can get the attention that they deserve. Also, rework is viewed as waste so quality issues should be addressed when they're discovered, not by assembling hundreds or thousands of vehicles incorrectly and then fixing them, fix the assembly line issues causing that misassembly.
[0] https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_....
And then multiply across everyone in a supply chain for a single product having to deal with waiting to receive giant parts orders from their vendors before they could start their own giant order to supply their customers.
It is smart to project to the world that just in time manufacturing is effective and then stockpile parts. This will get you ahead of competition if there is a problem like we experience now.
One criticism of Toyota's production system is that they aren't so much "just in time" as it sounds on the surface, rather they just force their suppliers to run the warehouse instead of them. Which still makes sense - Toyota wants to be in the car business, not the warehouse and logistics businesses.
Cars in, say, the 1960s were not "more reliable in general." It's not all semiconductor-related of course--they also rusted out quickly in areas that got snow--but 5 years/50K miles is about what you were looking at for vehicle lifetime. Also much lower fuel efficiency, to say nothing of lack of what we'd consider routine safety features today.
On that, Availability is the result of all the rest. With the important part of planned Availability, because that excludes stuff like planned maintenance. Arguably modern cars beat old ones in that category.
What's probably true is that older cars that aren't rusted out can probably be kept running by people with the appropriate mechanical skills even in the absence of proper factory/3rd party parts for longer than modern vehicles can. Given intact supply chains, modern vehicles are more available overall. But, to the point of the article, modern vehicles are more susceptible to lack of parts.
That being said, if I'd go on a 2k + mile trip I would put in some work to get the car fit for this. Looking at my dads VW camper, I'll just fill up drinking water, maybe gas and fuel. Without a serious amount of preventive maintenance those cars do have a tendency to break down so. I guess we are just not used to this kind cars or machinery anymore.
I think that is the largest appeal to me of older cars. There are only so many parts that can fail, and they are all repairable with some time and hand tools(and maybe a Haynes manual!).
(for people unfamiliar, a Haynes manual is a 3rd party manual customized for most makes/models of automobiles. It describes with pictures how to perform [almost] any repair.)
The chip-ification of cars has been going on for a really, really long time.
I don't remember how far my 1965 Austin Mini van had done by the time I scrapped it in 1978 but I'm quite sure it was much more than 50 k miles.
I merely added a small counter argument to the idea that cars of the period were necessarily short lived.
Is that true though? Average length of car ownership is at an all-time high of over 8 years. It was under 5 years just 20 years ago. Maybe length of ownership doesn't correlate to length of car life, but seems like a strong signal that car quality and lifespan is going up.
And you can also add laser eye and cosmetic surgery: have advanced by leaps and bounds in terms of safety and quality, while actually becoming less costly for the consumer.
There must be hundreds of chips in a modern car: Engine, ABS, wireless key, cruise control, radio, audio, electric windows, gps, battery management, airbags, seat-belt check, sensors, climate control, ...
possibly climate control (not needed for short rides, a fan will do), maybe even radio (can always add later) and electric windows
I'd buy that car if it was cheaper... I'd need AWD though, trailer hitch...
Wouldn’t even power steering use it? Headlights?
Engines would have engine control units running some kind of real-time OS, anti lock brakes, anti traction systems, airbags, power locks with wireless keys. Climate control vs just “AC fan on”
Even some ignition systems have chips that do some kind of key exchange to start the car. (Yes you can bypass it but now you’re making a car that’s easier to steal)
And a related question: modern cars are full of tech because that's what market demands. Can we expect the trend to reverse at some point?
For compact/subcompact sedans/hatches and midsize sedans the OEMs typically make a super stripped down variant so they can advertise an insanely low "starting at" MSRP. Dealers don't typically buy a lot of them so they're very hard to find and you'll likely have little room to haggle on price.
Nowadays there's a pretty long list of mandatory electronics and everything has at least one bus network in it but if you want to minimize the number of extraneous modules on that network then a stripped down economy car is your best bet.
No, they are nice to haves. anyone who is looking to save money on a car will buy a used car with those features because they get the cheaper price and the features.
Go for the Access version and you don't even get a radio.
Rear view cameras are mandatory since ~2014 so I don't think this is possible.
That would be hard to pull off without chips. Although I guess you could keep it completely isolated from the rest of the car.
And they were actually much more reliable and efficient. Fuel injection was light years ahead of carburetors.
And I’d argue it would be impossible to meet emissions without computer control of the engine.
(Including by people who've been disqualified...)