Not sure about jit requiring bigger highways. The components all need to be shipped sooner (and warehoused) or later (jit). Name amount of matter is transported either way.
Aside from the additional ships, you need additional containers, employees, etc. It also costs more in bunkers, etc. For JIT it wouldn't matter too much though. As long as it arrives on schedule it would be ok.
Guessing the big issue is delay in shipping of components/goods.
And for critical items bidding up the price of transport will pass those to consumer or force reorganization of the supply chain to other avenues (local or other shipping).
Medium term it's a big hiccup on the global JIT economy.
Makes sense though if the route is already getting prepped for one load. It's a huge amount of work from logistical and coordinating effort (trains getting re-routed, hazmats cleared, roads shut down, etc) to get the route setup. May as well send any other extremely large shipments along while it's cleared.
Lots of companies have huge pieces of equipment sitting at factory X that they would rather have at factory Y for example.
You still have to provide last mile delivery, loading and unloading operations thus it takes more time. Plus adjust the logistics chain. If you have big warehouses built for trucked goods, tough luck.
Supply chain issues were sooo much worse before JIT. Imagine one person taps the brakes, but every car weighs 100 tons.
When companies kept huge inventories, most of it was not useful to solve the supply chain issues that came up and often made it harder to respond to demand shocks.
Yes, JIT inventory meant delivered "from the warehouse to the workstation" and not "intercontinentally shipped with extremely slim margins."
But that's not what has happened here. Continually increasing demand (read population growth + geo-conglomeration of industries) has stretched the global supply network(s) to fragility, necessitating JIT in absurd distances and quantities, in turn requiring ships 400mx50m to squeeze through canals they barely clear the bed of at speeds slow enough for them to not cause over-swell but not fast enough for them to have enough thrust to overcome crosswinds.
In almost all certainty they have volume commitments out months - and have for at least two years.
JIT stopped being a reality a while ago.
If you know you're sitting on 2 months of inventory, and you're getting shipments that are equal to 1 month of capacity every month, and it takes 3-5 weeks by sea, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do still.
Also, depending on their contracts, they may not pay the vendor until they receive the goods at their location, so the sea freight shipment doesn't have a cost for time value of money.
If you're sitting on a buffer, time value of money doesn't matter - and only gets worse by spending more money to get it sooner if you can only produce say 5k cars/week - doesn't matter if you get parts sooner you can't use.
The last bit works, as long as the slow transportation is closely controlled. I tried it once, in the end warehouse space was cheaper.
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.
Yep! I work in a heavy industry now and we have original installations of equipment that take 9-12 months typically (after the shell of the building is in place). Once it's installed, it's getting run as much as possible for profits, and contracts for delivering product could very well prevent being able to do a 12 month hold on production while moving.
Some factories are located on rivers because the equipment brought in is many times the max allowable on roadways...there's no other way to get the equipment installed.
It seems like just in time to replenish a consciously sized inventory, rather than just in time to get a bolt on to the assembly line, would be a sensible arrangement.
Sizing of the inventory would be based on how long you've decided you need to operate if all inputs stop. So maybe they "just" need to increase that sizing, rather than effectively relying on the delivering semi trucks for inventory storage.
I drive a semi truck, and sometimes a trip will be designated JIT, with a note that being late may halt production. Quite often these trips are to deliver tires to a distributor, and not, say, to a car builder. And I often think "Really?" Followed by "OK, whatever."
There is also a phenomenon similar to (inverse) traffic jams where a bottleneck wanders up the supply chain. Just in time delivery has some disadvantages and we basically use the road (or rail, sea) as warehouse nowadays. But ships, trains and trucks might not get filled when production halted because of lacking parts. Still the trucks and ships are bound to their current job and are sitting empty somewhere. It will slowly entangle as transport priority gets reordered.
You are right in a certain way. What increases with distance is lead time and as result inventory. Both of which are off set by volume. Cross-border adds customs issues. Complexity is not that much of a problem nowadays, maybe it never was. You are right that all of this oblyakes sense with large numbers, small scale production is better done locally as a rule of thumb.
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