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> "...but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is qu
by clairity 6y ago
> "...but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is quite heavy and bulky."
to provide some color, just-in-time doesn't literally mean holding no inventory and perfectly matching inflows to outflows. it means that stores of inventory and intermediate work product are minimized as much as possible in light of the typical mean and variance of a process, but not more than that.
in the case of a town, that means you'd likely size the salt store to be one storm's worth of salt and then trigger a replenishment as soon as a storm is imminent (just in time; that is, when necessity is established, but no sooner). you'd also likely try to deplete the store at the end of a storm season and replenish a storm's worth at the beginning of the next.
- drewzero1 6y agoThat's assuming you can get salt in time for the storm, or even at all at that point. At least on the consumer side, a lot of the manufacturing facilities that produce deicing salt switch over to producing fertilizer around new year's. A year or two ago we had a late winter storm and all of the stores in the area were out, and their warehouses too.
- clairity 6y agoyes, good point. we base our statistical inferences on backward-looking data, but the future can change in ways we're unable to fully predict and account for. this illustrates that just-in-time isn't an unalloyed good. it trades off resiliency for cost (and a bit of agility). it also introduces more structural variance in the supply chain, exacerbating supply issues, which isn't obvious on first blush (operations research coursework covers this).