The chip shortage strikes again - Microsoft runing out of computers in its Azure UK datacentres

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

You can never ensure that there will not be a delay. Having 0 buffer in case of a truck accident or a train derailing is idiotic.

JIT doesn't operate on zero stock supply, it operates on minimum viable. Manufacturing isn't quite as simplistic as you're saying, delays are expected and accounted for. JIT in reality is just highly calculated delivery times on supplies with tracking throughout the process to detect and allow mitigations for delays. The point is to remove unnecessarily large supplies of stock, not zero stock at all.

 

JIT is of course less resilient to problems, but how much is down to how each manufacturer actually does it and processes in place to mitigate issues, like alternate suppliers (probably at higher cost) etc.

 

5 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

For what? Not taking care of a warehouse in the midwest? Was the cost of said warehouse really worth the risk?

For a manufacture as large as say Toyota, yes. Plus they make so many cars any warehouse could never hope to have any amount of supply that would mean much at all, when output gets high enough consistent supply is just a necessity not an option.

 

Also let me pose a question. Warehouse A has stock of 10,000 of Part A, this represents 6 months of supply based on manufacturing output. The manufacturer now gets a defect notification from the parts supplier about Part A and a recall is issued. What happens?

 

That's a massive problem with a huge amount of supply stock that now can't even be used. Now you have to manage the logistics of accepting the new revision of Part A and the return of the old revision of Part A.

 

Defects happen, JIT handles this much more efficiently and also reduces the chances of error and incorrect parts being used.

 

JIT vs non-JIT doesn't really apply to massive scale manufacturing, anything large enough in volume becomes de facto JIT.

 

P.S. Ease up on the more off-topic/political slanted comments, those are territories not to be discussion unless specifically and directly related to the topic i.e. pointing out where parts are or were being made.

[mr moose]

17 minutes ago, leadeater said:

 

 

JIT is of course less resilient to problems, but how much it down to how each manufacturer actually does it and processes in place to mitigate issues, like alternate suppliers (probably at higher cost) etc.

 

 

In my personal experience JIT becomes more problematic the less reliable your supply chain is.   Of course if your management is hopeless then even with a good supply chain JIT can cause problems, but that's not actually JIT, that's just bad management poorly implementing an inadequate product supply process.

 

The auto industry typically has a very effective JIT because it normally includes redundant/standby supply sources.   The last major production line I worked at (production supervisor, line worker training, process technical advisor and QC controller) tried to implement JIT but refused to consider redundancy in logistics and supply which caused major grief on the actual production line when the only company they used failed to deliver.    They were always failing to look at the bigger picture though, the morons refused to give me space to pull faulty products offline while I sorted repairs and replacement parts (which meant the entire process line clogged every time we had one product unable to proceed to the next stage .

[shadow_ray]

On 7/10/2022 at 5:41 AM, DANK_AS_gay said:

You can never ensure that there will not be a delay. Having 0 buffer in case of a truck accident or a train derailing is idiotic. That leads to inefficiency and delays if everything doesn't go 100% perfectly, which literally never happens. Relying on global relations to remain the way they are is also idiotic. You can never ensure timing is right, meaning that every week is a gamble. For what? Not taking care of a warehouse in the midwest? Was the cost of said warehouse really worth the risk?

The goal is not to have zero inventory but to eliminate excess inventory. It's not just the cost of the warehouse but also the cost of the parts in the warehouse.

 

- snip - self censorship - snip -

 

On 7/10/2022 at 5:41 AM, DANK_AS_gay said:

Remember when the US was an English colony? Well, no, you aren't 200 years old, but anyways... It was a bunch of backwater hicks with no formal military, weapons training, no Navy, vs the biggest empire the world has seen. We won. David vs Goliath.

And great use off the political situation in Europe. Franklin got the better deal not Louis XVI.

[LAwLz]

14 hours ago, leadeater said:

JIT is of course less resilient to problems, but how much is down to how each manufacturer actually does it and processes in place to mitigate issues, like alternate suppliers (probably at higher cost) etc.

It is also important to note that JIT have worked pretty damn well for decades.

The entire conversation reminds of this video, and it's not the first time I am bringing this video up:

 

The TL;DR is:

We shouldn't be against something that is superior in 9/10 ways, just because "sometimes it will be worse".

For example JIT is great in a lot of ways, and non-JIT is impractical. It worked up until basically the entire world took a pause for like a year or two. Should we scrap JIT just because "if we get a global pandemic it might have negative effects"?

[RedRound2]

On 7/10/2022 at 12:58 AM, DANK_AS_gay said:

And it made getting GPUs for our armed forces (A100s for an Air Force supercomputer were delayed by 8 months) difficult and expensive. Etc. Etc. This affects everyone. This is also the one time in like 100 years America can fight in a war and be the good guys. I'm saying this as a 17 year old relatively fit (i.e, not overweight/obese) male that would be drafted if the war went on for over 8 months. I would be willing to fight over this.

Be careful what you wish for. US getting into war will inevitably make things worse globally, not only in terms of geo political stability, but in terms of economics as well . I know its seems easy to think to deploy troops and finish of everything in a week or two max, but that's almost never the case and there will be countless ripple effects, that would lead to bigger issues. Best case, we make everything more worse. Worst case, we find ourselves in an all out nuclear war.

 

We live in the most peaceful time in history. And humans are at the end of the day greedy and selfish creatures. So issues like this are bound to happen and as we technologically advance further, more and more regular people are slowly starting to get the power to disrupt world peace

[MageTank]

On 7/10/2022 at 12:54 AM, leadeater said:

JIT doesn't operate on zero stock supply, it operates on minimum viable. Manufacturing isn't quite as simplistic as you're saying, delays are expected and accounted for. JIT in reality is just highly calculated delivery times on supplies with tracking throughout the process to detect and allow mitigations for delays. The point is to remove unnecessarily large supplies of stock, not zero stock at all.

 

JIT is of course less resilient to problems, but how much is down to how each manufacturer actually does it and processes in place to mitigate issues, like alternate suppliers (probably at higher cost) etc.

 

For a manufacture as large as say Toyota, yes. Plus they make so many cars any warehouse could never hope to have any amount of supply that would mean much at all, when output gets high enough consistent supply is just a necessity not an option.

 

Also let me pose a question. Warehouse A has stock of 10,000 of Part A, this represents 6 months of supply based on manufacturing output. The manufacturer now gets a defect notification from the parts supplier about Part A and a recall is issued. What happens?

 

That's a massive problem with a huge amount of supply stock that now can't even be used. Now you have to manage the logistics of accepting the new revision of Part A and the return of the old revision of Part A.

 

Defects happen, JIT handles this much more efficiently and also reduces the chances of error and incorrect parts being used.

 

JIT vs non-JIT doesn't really apply to massive scale manufacturing, anything large enough in volume becomes de facto JIT.

 

P.S. Ease up on the more off-topic/political slanted comments, those are territories not to be discussion unless specifically and directly related to the topic i.e. pointing out where parts are or were being made.

JIT works for a lot of things, but it also has its drawbacks. We use JIT for components that are known to have revisions or prone to "bad batches" such as GPUs, motherboards, processors, etc. Larger items that are expensive to ship such as chassis are ordered in bulk and stocked domestically to avoid the ever increasing costs of shipping containers. God forbid you have another Suez canal incident where people start an all-out bidding war for containers just to get product air shipped because the supply they were relying on at a certain time is now in limbo.

 

I can't speak for every industry, but for system integration we are lucky to have global logistics companies that buys international products for domestic sale that we can work through in a pinch if one of our international order falls through. They work with companies like AMD, Nvidia and Intel to ensure they have a decent surplus of inventory to sell here in the states at a slight markup and we've relied on that every now and then when something breaks in the JIT chain. For a chassis with custom tooling though, we have to get that directly from the source and unfortunately that source isn't domestic, nor would these logistics companies purchase inventory to store that only our company would buy.

 

TL:DR? JIT as much as you can, but stock up on what you can't.