just-in-time manufacturing

Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, also known as just-in-time production or the Toyota production system (TPS), is a methodology aimed primarily at reducing flow times within production as well as response times from suppliers and to customers. Following its origin and development in Japan, largely in the 1960s and 1970s and particularly at Toyota, JIT migrated to Western industry in the 1980s, where its features were put into effect in many manufacturing companies—as is attested to in several books and compendia of case studies and articles from the 1980s.