this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
1080 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
60062 readers
3404 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I blame lean philosophy. Keeping spare parts and redundancy is expensive so definitely don't do it...which is just rolling the dice until it comes up snake eyes and your plant shuts down.
It's the "save 5% yearly and stop trying to avoid a daily 5% chance of disaster"
Over prepared is silly, but so is under prepared.
They were under prepared.
I work in a manufacturing company that was owned by the founder for 50 years until about 4 years ago when he retired. He disagreed with a lot of the ideas behind lean manufacturing so we had like 5 years worth of inventory sitting in our warehouse.
When the new management came in, there was a lot of squawking about inefficiency, how wasteful it was to keep so much raw material on the shelf, and how we absolutely needed to sell it off or get rid of it.
Then a funny little thing happened in 2020.
Suddenly, we were the only company in our industry still churning out product. Other companies were calling us, desperate to buy our products or even just our raw material. We saw MASSIVE growth the next two years and came out of the pandemic better than ever. And it was mostly thanks to the old owners view that "Just In Time" manufacturing was BS.
Cool story, but a once every 150 years pandemic is hardly a good reason to keep wasting money on storing stuff. A fire or a flood was much more likely to wipe it all out in 50 years.
Even in your anecdote the owner never actually benefited from the extra costs.
Depending on what you're producing costs to maintain extra inventory of raw materials can be massive and for the company the size of Toyota, multiply that by million.
Imagine doing something or having a life/business philosophy that doesn't exist for your own soul benefit, and exists maybe for the benefit of others.