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Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by mcguire on Friday August 21, 2020 @02:12PM (#24237387)
Rather than stability, think of it as robustness or flexibility. Past a certain point, efficiency is an enemy of robustness.

Buying in bulk is cool. If you buy a big package of paper towels, it's cheaper and you don't have to worry about running out. The fact that you have a cabinet full of paper towels isn't a big deal. But suppose you find a really great deal on a semi-trailer load of towels and stock up. Now you have your guest bedroom full of paper towels. The next week, your cousin Edgar's house burns down; you'd like to offer him and his wife a room to stay in temporarily, but you have all this paper in the way. You have lost some flexibility.

A bigger problem is, say, corporate supply chains. With just-in-time supply, you don't have to store inputs and can focus on producing outputs; it's very efficient. But then there's a pandemic or a fire in a factory somewhere, and the supply chain falls apart. Now your outputs are perhaps in greater demand, but you can't take advantage because you have no inputs. You're out of business for the duration. You can't flexibly respond.

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by Jtsummers on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:04PM (#24238371)
JIT isn't the problem in your last example, it's a weak supply chain. If you have a singular source for some critical or necessary thing, you have a risk whether you're using JIT concepts or not. Though higher if you take JIT to an extreme. Your sources need to be that, sources, and ideally geographically separated. See the various industry crises following natural disasters in Taiwan for why.

The proper, though not easy, thing to do is have some primary sources of your materials and secondary sources to handle surges and supply issues with your primes. You may still have a production slowdown, but hopefully not a shutdown. And like with backup, if you don't use them you don't have them. You have to place orders with all sources, and use materials from all sources to ensure that they are in fact up to snuff. It'd suck to buy your RAM from Foo until a flood, and then find that BAR's RAM doesn't actually work (or doesn't work with your motherboards).

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by mcguire on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:42PM (#24238673)
Right.

But, having a single source is more efficient than multiple sources---you can integrate tighter with their ordering system, packaging, product quirks. Until it stops working.

Having all of your sources in one country is more efficient. Until it doesn't work.

Managing all of your materials just-in-time is more efficient. Until a backhoe hits the gas main in the street outside and you can no longer get trucks into your factory and have to shut down the line for the duration.

A company with a weak (but not completely idiotic) supply chain will have a significant margin over a company paying extra for a strong supply chain. Until something goes wrong.

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by Jtsummers on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:56PM (#24238800)
I guess my point is that, in everything I've read and experienced, JIT isn't about efficiency to an extreme (drop to 1 supplier, have 1 uberefficient factory, have 1 expert). You still maintain a buffer, and if possible multiple suppliers. The source of JIT (in manufacturing) is primarily Lean or the Toyota Production System. Those do not endorse zero-buffers or sole-sourcing for the purposes of efficiency. The purpose of reducing buffers is to expose inefficiencies elsewhere. And you find the right level of buffering for you based on your suppliers and risk tolerance.
Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by worik on Friday August 21, 2020 @08:55PM (#24240626)
But it is not simple to find the "right" level.

You do not have to live for ever, so surviving a extinction level ecvent is more than the "right" level.

Being so brittle that the failure of one delivery kills you is less than the "right" level.

How long do you want to live? And when you die, how is it going to happen?

It is pleasing to see firms go out of business in a orderly fashion, such that they have the resources to shut up the shop properly, and every one in the business gets "onto the life-rafts". But it is more common to see businesses go down in a screaming heap with huge debts and big messes for others to clean up.

When I was at business school I was taught that a firm should have the correct amount of debt such that it maximised the tax shield of interest payments and had no fat that a hostile acquirer could use to do a hostile takeover.

That was in 2007. I am quite sure the course teaches something different now!

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by rdtwo on Friday August 21, 2020 @03:09PM (#24237909)
Just in time is synonymous with always late. Might work well with simple fungible goods but breaks down on complex stuff
Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by unilynx on Friday August 21, 2020 @03:50PM (#24238262)
complex stuff like building cars?
Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by rdtwo on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:38PM (#24238639)
I think but you’d have to ask insiders if it works for them or inspite of it. In my industry it the latter where product arrives late and there is enormous recovery costs that are rarely mentioned or properly accounted for, everybody up top just sort of pretends it’s not routine when it actually is. Typically these sorts of things don’t make it out to the general public in press releases though. Holding a bit more product and some spares would have been far cheaper then the constant recovery effort.
Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by Jtsummers on Friday August 21, 2020 @04:49PM (#24238739)
A quality of most JIT systems I've experienced (and texts on the topic) is maintaining a sufficient buffer (alluded to in your last sentence). Taking it to its extreme (that is, essentially 0 inventory buffer) JIT only works if everything else works perfectly. That is an extreme position not endorsed by anyone or any text I have ever encountered. But it does remind me of the shitty takes on Agile I've seen (no planning, in particular). So seeing it in the wild would not surprise me.

"Sufficient" is dependent on a lot of factors, though. No one can tell you a definitive answer without knowing your system (your suppliers, your customers, your rates of production, your supply of capital to withstand a drop in production).

Re:Efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better by rdtwo on Friday August 21, 2020 @05:54PM (#24239274)
funny that you mention shitty agile we do that too