Wal-Mart Just in Time Delivery

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Wal-Mart has been known to be a market leader in the retail industry in the world. The company attributes its success to its "rich history, culture, and corporate values that made it focused on its operations ". http://www.working.com/profiles/walmart/profile.html

The company continuously works toward improvement of its operations through fostering on innovation coupled with excellence. Among the strategies that the company has been known for is its implementation of just-in-time inventory policy. To industry experts, 'Just-in-time' is a management philosophy and not a technique. Its objective is to meet customer demand exactly, in time, quality and quantity, whether te h'customer' is the final purchaser of the product or another process further along the production line.

JIT is a Japanese management philosophy which has been applied in practice since the early 1970s in many Japanese manufacturing organisations. An online source noted that the implementation of JIT resulted to workers' high motivation to meet high standards of performance. The system also encouraged teamwork among employees toward the achievement of goals (http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/dstools/process/jit.html).

According to Certo (2000), JIT is a form of inventory control which is a technique for reducing inventories to a minimum (and at times zero) by arranging for supplies to be delivered just-in-time to be used. In order words, it can be system in which companies order just enough of the supply that they need from their suppliers, no more no less.

JIT Inventory is useful for several reasons. An online source noted that among the companies that implement JIT is Wal-Mart. JIT inventory allows the company to satisfy orders at a lower cost both for the benefit of the company and the customer. "The company orders supplies, only when they know they are about to run out and need to restock, even then, they ...