> JIT made sense for Toyota and they took steps to ensure their suppliers were beholden to them (that is they shipped whenever Toyota needed it).

Did that still hold true during the pandemic? I mean if you can't get stuff on the ships (huge part of the chain) they can't go out. It's not always a choice for suppliers as we saw.

Sorry I don’t follow your question. The pandemic resulted in both closed factories and ships not leaving port. A double whammy for JIT.

Yeah that's what I mean - due to "the double whammy" they couldn't guarantee their deals with Toyota so it's all sort of moot, right?

Toyota had identified the strategic risk of chip supply some years earlier, and made sure they had access to large buffers of them, reducing the impact.

I’m not sure about the impact of shipping though.

See: https://www.autoblog.com/2021/03/09/toyota-how-it-avoided-se...

JIT also works really well when all your major manufacturing centers are an average 3-4 hour drive from each other. 6-8 at the furthest maybe.

JIT breaks down over global distances because “in time” and “instant” mean very different things even when moving nearly at the speed of sound. Even if no one embargoed anyone, you can’t beat the laws of physics.

Just in time doesn’t break down at all — it just calls for larger buffers

You can stream audio with a 5s delay and 10s jitter if you have a large enough buffer

JIT doesn’t mean instant. It means sizing to the first derivative (rate) and second derivative (jitter) of your f(x) (supply)