In today's highly dynamic and rapidly changing environment, global competition among organizations has led to higher demands on the manufacturing organizations. The manufacturing industry has experienced an unprecedented degree of change in the last three decades, involving drastic changes in management approaches, product and process technologies, customer expectations, and competitive behavior. These challenges are forcing manufacturing organizations globally to foster high reliability, availability and maintainability in the manufacturing systems. The recent competitive trends have been...

The increased global competition has led the industry to enhanced efficiency by means of economies of scale and internal specialization. To meet all the global challenges, organizations have adopted various innovative manufacturing techniques including just-in-time (JIT) production systems, International Standards Organization (ISO) 9000 certifications and total quality management (TQM). JIT has been envisaged as one of the strategic management initiatives evolved by Japans manufacturers to produce good quality products at low price.JIT enhances manufacturing performance by taking up...