Just-in-time replenishment decisions for assembly manufacturing with investor-supplied finance

While JIT ideas have been enthusiastically embraced by manufacturing practitioners, the small replenishment batch sizes advocated are difficult to reconcile with the standard management science cost trade-off approach. The difficulty is diagnosed as being due to the standard assumption that capital for inventory is borrowed and hence boundless. We present a new analysis of inventory reduction decisions, such as adopting JIT replenishment or component substitution, using a deterministic batch sizing model which assumes that inventory is financed by the investors in the company and is thus finite. As a consequence, the investment level is treated as an additional variable of the decision analysis. Using the well established technique of constrained optimisation it is shown that for investor-financed operations the effective value of money invested in inventory is the marginal return on investment of the company, and increases with the degree of constraint. Thus, JIT policy options are especially favourable when low levels of inventory investment are sought, even without setup cost reduction, because the capital formerly invested in stock holdings of the JIT components can be reinvested in the inventory of other components to make their replenishment more efficient using larger batch sizes. The analysis is illustrated using an actual case study of a small manufacturing enterprise seeking to reduce inventory and increase return on investment. The analysis has interesting practical implications for inventory managers including a proposed simple method for identifying candidate components for JIT replenishment.