2. Doest he first stepa n organisationt ake in implementingJ IT affect its level of success? The importance of the reason behind implementing JIT varies among firms experiencing low, medium, and high levels of success. This study indicates that all firms rank reducing lead time, work in process, and raw materials among the top five reasons for implementing JIT. In addition to that, the firms with medium and high levels of success rank increasing inventory turnover as an important reason for implementing JIT. The firms with high levels of success also include improving quality among the top five reasons. Customers requiring JIT was ranked as the number two reason by most of the firms that experienced low success in implementing. This reason was reported by Billesbach to be important to 47% of the respondents in this survey. Thus the results of this study appear to be consistent with those of Billesbach. However, Billesbach did not consider the level of success achieved by this respondents. He was interested in the percentage of respondents who thought each of the four reasons for JIT implementation (meshed with business
strategy, customers required it, competition used it, and JIT endorsed as corporate policy) important. This study finds that firms that considered their own internal needs for implementing JIT were more successful at it than firms that were responding to external factors. It seems that to have at least medium success in JIT implementation, a firm should be inward driven, i. e. motivated to examine how JIT can improve the organisation itself, rather than implementing JIT merely to satisfy those who are external to the organisation. Since the late 1970s, when the competitive economic race with Japanese companies began, many US companies have rushed to incorporate JIT concepts into their manufacturing facilities. They believed that using the methods of Japanese companies would result in similar success. Unfortunately, emulating the Japanese methods per se did not guarantee success. Some excuses given for failure were the strong Japanese corporate loyalty, the work ethic in Japan, and the Japanese national character. An examination of the growing number of success stories for American firms makes it apparent that those
excuses are, for the most part, invalid.