City Research Online

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic and other recent disruptions in the early 2020s led to sections in the business press blaming Just-in-Time (JIT) practices for operational failings. Consequently, there are calls for moving away from JIT toward holding more inventory as preparation against future disruptions, which is referred to as just-in-case, given companies’ painful experiences with supply shortages. However, the academic community is also divided. Some scholars argue that JIT is not resilient, while others maintain that JIT can continue providing superior performance even with disruptions. Motivated by this debate, we discuss various misconceptions about JIT that underlie this debate. Furthermore, we present different ways to adapt JIT for turbulent environments and argue that companies can improve their supply chain performance if JIT supply chain segments are chosen fittingly—even more so—during disruptions.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Authors. Production and Operations Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Production and Operations Management Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Publisher Keywords:	disruptions, inventory, JIT, just-in-time, supply chain resilience
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Management

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