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Logistics & Supply Chain vocabulary · Demand Planning

Just-in-time

Meaning in logistics & supply chain, with examples

phraseCommon term

In logistics & supply chain, just-in-time means: An approach in which materials arrive exactly when they are needed for production or sale, so that very little stock is held.

In Turkish: tam zamanında, tam zamanında üretim, JIT

How it is used

Developed within the Toyota Production System and widely used in car manufacturing. Often shortened to JIT and used before nouns: just-in-time delivery, JIT supplier. It saves storage costs but makes a company more vulnerable to delays and disruptions.

Example sentences

  1. Seats are delivered just-in-time to the assembly line, in the order the cars are built.

  2. The pandemic showed the risks of relying only on just-in-time supply.

Common collocations

  • just-in-time delivery
  • just-in-time production
  • JIT supplier
  • move away from just-in-time
  • inventoryAll the goods and materials a company holds at a given time, including raw materials, work in progress and finished products.
  • lead timeThe time between placing an order or starting a process and receiving the finished result, for example from sending a purchase order to the goods arriving.
  • disruptionAn unexpected event that interrupts the normal flow of goods, such as a natural disaster, a strike, a port closure, a cyber attack or a supplier failure.
  • safety stockExtra stock kept on top of expected demand to protect against sudden increases in demand or late deliveries from suppliers.
  • supplierA company or person that provides goods, materials or services to another business, usually at an agreed price and on agreed delivery terms.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Demand Planning

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