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For Toyota, there are no custom orders. You wait until the dealer gets a specific allocation. I imagine that this is due to their precisely tuned JIT manufactur

For Toyota, there are no custom orders. You wait until the dealer gets a specific allocation. I imagine that this is due to their precisely tuned JIT manufacturing? For many other brands, your custom order goes to the factory when you make some small commitment.

bluGill 4y ago
JIT can allow customization. Toyota doesn't want to work that way, but others do. John Deere (the company I work for) makes everything to order, when you place your order you are buying a spot on the assembly line for the options you want. We can't even make all the combinationally possible options in a single year for many products (big car makers have much larger volumes). Whatever options you want is what we will put on yours. In order to pull that off our lines have to be flexible. Some options require a special jig, so we have larger factories to put all the jigs near the line, and we allow time for the person at the station to get the right jig out and store it away when done. We could produce product a little faster if there was just one jig on the line, thus the smaller line could move faster (or more likely use that space for more stations), switching the jigs out monthly. It doesn't make sense for us to do that, but for Toyota is probably does. (I'm told Honda has automated the jig replacement so any line can produce anything - but this limits what they can make)
- jiveturkey 4y ago
  > JIT can allow customization Yep. All the large car manufacturers, and maybe all of them large and small, have JIT supply chains. I didn't mean to imply that JIT couldn't support customization, since obviously others allow you to build custom, just that Toyota's reasons for not doing customization may be linked to their particular JIT choices. And not some other deciding factor. It's worth noting that Toyota suffered least (or last, anyway) with COVID-related supply chain restrictions. Their JIT is a particularly fine-tuned machine. They are the inventors of it, are they not? I read somewhere that many, if not most, others' are a poor simulacrum of Toyota's, and they don't understand it really. Like the way that most people implement microservices, or big-A Agile.

bluGill 4y ago

JIT can allow customization. Toyota doesn't want to work that way, but others do. John Deere (the company I work for) makes everything to order, when you place your order you are buying a spot on the assembly line for the options you want. We can't even make all the combinationally possible options in a single year for many products (big car makers have much larger volumes). Whatever options you want is what we will put on yours. In order to pull that off our lines have to be flexible. Some options require a special jig, so we have larger factories to put all the jigs near the line, and we allow time for the person at the station to get the right jig out and store it away when done. We could produce product a little faster if there was just one jig on the line, thus the smaller line could move faster (or more likely use that space for more stations), switching the jigs out monthly. It doesn't make sense for us to do that, but for Toyota is probably does. (I'm told Honda has automated the jig replacement so any line can produce anything - but this limits what they can make)

jiveturkey 4y ago
> JIT can allow customization Yep. All the large car manufacturers, and maybe all of them large and small, have JIT supply chains. I didn't mean to imply that JIT couldn't support customization, since obviously others allow you to build custom, just that Toyota's reasons for not doing customization may be linked to their particular JIT choices. And not some other deciding factor. It's worth noting that Toyota suffered least (or last, anyway) with COVID-related supply chain restrictions. Their JIT is a particularly fine-tuned machine. They are the inventors of it, are they not? I read somewhere that many, if not most, others' are a poor simulacrum of Toyota's, and they don't understand it really. Like the way that most people implement microservices, or big-A Agile.