Consequences of High Variety Products on Jit Systems' Performance

Other conference contribution, 1989

This paper describes the impacts of two product design factors on the possibilities for implementing and running JIT systems in an efficient way. At first the relation to product structure is dealt with. The way in which different classes of variant components are affecting the materials flow are discussed, with special attention to the number of alternative components in a product function and related to the commonality problem. The second factor is how the design via product quality affects the material flow. Empirical data from several Swedish companies are presented.