JIT, however; is not a magical pill that will heal all of a company's ailments overnight. The first and perhaps most important part of JIT is the commitment to it. JIT as a system usually requires an emphasis on production smoothing, capacity buffers, setup reduction, cross training and plant layout and Total Quality Management (2). In other words, a full and effective JIT system requires more than just hanging up a sign that reads "JIT employed here" and telling your workers that JIT is now the their production system. .
The commitment for JIT must start at the top and trickle down. Everyone in the company from the CEO to the guy that cleans toilets on holidays must believe in the system. Sometimes the changing of the organizational culture is the hardest part. Change is a given in life, but human nature resist change (1). This resistance is grouped into two common forms of emotional and rational resistance. In emotional resistance, there are psychological feelings that hinder the performance of the employee in the production process. Rational resistance is the deficient of the needed information for the workers to perform the job well (1). Companies that for decades have relied on safety stock to get them through bad times must now change and admit that they have problems somewhere in their process and find and fix these problems (4), as JIT significantly reduces inventory.
The relationship between management and labor must also be redone. JIT requires a mutual trust to exist between these two forces. Management must trust labor to the job that they have been trained to do and in turn, labor must work to its full potential and perform its work with the best interest of the company and its customers in mind. Respect for people is actually one of the two main philosophies of JIT; with the other being the elimination of waste (2).
One of the strengths of the just-in-time system that some companies do use is the kanaban system.
