Just-In-Time Implementation in Small and Medium Enterprises

The new uprising in the manufacturing goods and service sector has created great challenges for the industry. Now-a-days companies are highly quality focused and customer driven. Besides quality, a company has to maintain the cost of the product at a reasonable level. It has to supply products at reliable and reduced delivery time. Customers also demand more product variants that means reduced lot size and high flexibility in operations. Confronting these challenges, companies are forced to find ways to reduce costs improve quality and meet the ever-changing demands of their customers. There is no question that the elimination of waste is an essential factor for survival in today's manufacturing world. Just-in-time production system is one of these initiatives that focus on cost reduction by eliminating non-value added activities. Many manufacturers have come to realize that the traditional mass production concept has to be adapted to the new ideas of JIT manufacturing to continue moving up the ladder in a global, competitive and growing market. Just-in-time represents a philosophy of continual improvement to obtain performance excellence in the operations of an inventory system. This management philosophy is primarily applied in large-scale industries but there is no reason why similar concepts can not be applied in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) as well. This research paper addresses the implementation of Just-in-Time production system in SMEs. The goal of this research is to investigate how JIT can be implemented in SMEs. Finally the conclusions and recommendations are also provided.