Implementation of JIT purchasing: An integrated approach

This article addresses the necessity of integration between buyer and supplier for effective implementation of the JIT system. An integrated lot-splitting model of facilitating multiple shipments in small lots is developed and compared with the existing approach in a simple JIT environment, single-buyer-single-supplier, under deterministic conditions for a single product. It is shown that the optimal policy adopted by the integrated approach can provide a strong and consistent cost-minimizing effect for both buyer and supplier over the existing approach.