As major manufacturers increasingly demand that their subcontractors adopt the Japanese Just-In-Time system of delivering parts to the factory only hours before they are needed – not earlier, and woe betide you if they are late – a salutary tale from SCI Systems Inc, Huntsville Alabama, related in the Wall Street Journal, underlines just what […]
As major manufacturers increasingly demand that their subcontractors adopt the Japanese Just-In-Time system of delivering parts to the factory only hours before they are needed – not earlier, and woe betide you if they are late – a salutary tale from SCI Systems Inc, Huntsville Alabama, related in the Wall Street Journal, underlines just what it means: SCI does about 40% of its $550m annual business stuffing boards for IBM, and on one occasion in 1984, an SCI cargo plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the Florida Everglades at 4am en route for a large customer widely believed to have been IBM; SCI chairman and co-founder Olin King despatched air boats to collect the circuit boards from the ditched plane, and rushed them to a Florida motel for testing, hauled a crew of production workers out of bed and opened up the plant, hired another plane, and by 10am, six hours later, had delivered enough boards to the customer’s plant to satisfy the day’s production needs.
