Just-In-Time supplier inventory: An empirical implementation model

Just-In-Time (JIT) research has been limited primarily to descriptive works, case studies, surveys, and a few simulations and analytic models. This paper, by contrast, reports on an empirical field study exploring the relative importance of several JIT-based independent variables to the total level of supplier-linked inventory in an environment where the customer was implementing JIT. The results lend some support (as expected) to classical inventory theory, but also indicate the relative importance of the variables in this JIT environment. Open-ended discussions with customer and supplier managers lend further insights into the results.