Michael Schwartz and Andrew Fish, "Just-in-Time Inventories in Old Detroit," Business History 40 (#3, July 1998), 48-71. (original) (raw)

For most scholars the key element that distinguished the flexible and efficient Toyota automobile manufacturing system from the inflexible and inefficient mass production systems in Detroit could be found in the tight coupling between part manufacturing and final assembly. And the linchpin of this tight coupling was the just-in-time inventory systems that brought these parts to the assemblers without either production interruption of expensive stock piles. We demonstrate that these features of Toyotaism were also central features to the Detroit production culture before World War II, and that they conferred the same flexibility and efficiency on the pre-World War II automobile industry. The inefficient system that could not compete with Toyotaism in the 1970s was actually constructed after World War II.