Just-in-time is sometimes referred to as the Toyota production model because it was developed by Taichii Ono, a former chief engineer of Toyota.
After 1945, Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda wanted his company to quickly catch up with the American automobile groups. But the Japanese market was not large enough to make car production more profitable through economies of scale. Instead of producing more than the market needed, Toyoda decided to eliminate as much waste as possible from the value added process.
Taiichi Ono then developed the comprehensive JIT principle, which was not only used for production, but also for delivery and distribution. Various other methods are combined in order for the just-in-time approach to work. In order to keep track of the flow of material and information, Kanban boards are used at the workshop level, for example. This agile approach is now also used independently of production in project management in many industries.
Although the Japanese company was unable to catch up with its American competitors in the following years, the resulting economic success attracted international attention and led to the just-in-time delivery model spreading worldwide and being used to this day.