TAM for semiconductors turned out to be wayyyyyy bigger than the world's manufacturing capacity for semiconductors. I don't know how this caught manufacturers by surprise, but perhaps there's bottlenecks in talent, supporting industry and infrastructure that I'm not aware of that would have made additional expansion difficult previously.

There’s just not flexibility built in to the supply chain because flexibility adds cost.

When things go well this just in time manufacturing is lauded as a huge money saver, when they aren’t… you get now.

The business of running everything to the wire on credit and working “cost of capital” so much into business decisions gets us here.

Blame this on just-in-time supply chains where no one wants to hold inventory. It’s been MBA dogma for the last two decades.

Seems like we are dealing with the opposite issue here where factory production is booked many months in advance and can’t quickly adapt to new demand.

The factory is not in trouble, their customers are.

Neither JIT nor many other things factors in "global pandemic," but proper JIT that knows how to scale up/down theoretically could handle things, its just the human element that fucks up the system. Yeah beancounters are beancounters but trying to blame JIT is really off course.

I disagree, respectfully. Not that I think everyone should inventory a year of everything. But the ethos of JIT is that you can treat your supply chain as if it’s infinite, and this keep it close to your projections.

Automotive got hit especially hard since any feature that requires electrics has the microprocessor embedded in that feature. Very cost effective-you don’t ship extra cpu power for unused features.

Tesla did the opposite though—centralized processing and over allotted cpu cycles by also made it easy to upgrade via software only.

Isn't the problem that is is not easy to scale some things up and down? This sounds a lot like no true scotsman.

> This sounds a lot like no true scotsman.

The claim is more that they are bad planners, orthogonal from whether they use JIT or not.

They're not doing proper supply management. You can do proper supply management with JIT or without JIT. You can also do improper supply management with JIT or without JIT.

For it to be "no true scotsman" they would have to be claiming that "doing JIT" is a solution to supply management. And they're not claiming that.

I guess you are partly right, but parent said "proper JIT" would work well without any evidence to what that means. Surely not everyone is doing the "improper" JIT.