Just-in-Time & Kanban Practices

UPM excels in working with just-in-time and kanban fulfillment and lean manufacturing practices. Just-in-time (JIT) is an inventory strategy that strives to improve a business’s return-on-investment by reducing in-process inventory and associated carrying costs.

To meet JIT objectives, the process relies on signals (kanban) between different points in the process, which tells production when to make the next part. When implemented correctly, JIT and kanban practices can dramatically improve a manufacturing organization’s return-on-investment, quality, and efficiency by substantially reducing product lead times.

In the past, a partner utilizing standard logistical and inventory strategies would typically predict demand based on sales forecasting. Then they would manufacture and store the product in a warehouse while waiting for orders. This is unnecessary, inefficient, time-consuming, and wasteful due to the cash flow losses from to the production of excess inventory. This also results in additional carrying costs that eat away at profit margins.

The last thing you want to spend your time worrying about when you’re overseeing product distribution is losing out on money because of overproduction. Companies tend to buy more product than they need when market forecasting indicates that it will perform well. The fact is that there’s no sure-fire way to guarantee a product will perform well or perform poorly until it actually hits the market. Overproducing is usually associated with the increased costs in manufacturing product overseas before shipping it to the U.S. This process takes a long time to begin with, so it’s understandable to consider ordering more than necessary rather than to risk supply shortages. But at UPM, we’ve refined our process thoroughly to the point that making more than necessary is no longer required to have products ready quickly.

When you choose UPM, our location inside the U.S. means that you don’t have to wait on long lead times to get your products from production to shipping. Our convenient location coupled with our innovative processes keep production fast and light. Plus, our specialized logistics department lets us get products where they’re going fast so that you won’t have to worry about organizing anything.

We also offer a host of finalizing procedures for products that extend beyond simple injection molding. Our offerings have expanded to include assembling, packaging, and inventory control of your products as well. This allows us to have a full suite solution to your production needs from beginning to end that doesn’t eat up money with unnecessary surplus manufacturing of parts and products.

For example, at UPM, a partner can forward orders to us on a Monday and have the order manufactured, assembled, packaged, and shipped out to the customer by Thursday. This decreases order lead time from eight to ten weeks overseas to just one week. It also lowers costs and allows the company to maintain healthier cash flow and and thrive, despite volatile market conditions.