The Big Ideas, as a series, is about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. The first installment was about Single-Piece Flow (SPF).
This week we’ll talk about Just-in-Time manufacturing (JIT).
JIT is the idea that our own manufacturing inventory only arrives exactly when we need it to, that a rider ordering a bike actually triggers the process of the bike’s component parts beginning to move toward the bike builder’s work space. This is the method that supports the madness of Single-Piece Flow, and the myriad complications of building fully custom bikes on a short timeline.
We make it work by doing a lot of forecasting. After crafting 30,000 bikes, one-at-a-time, by-hand, we have a lot of data to crunch, so we do our best to see the future, the materials we’ll need to build the bikes our riders will want.
Another thing we do is keep all of our materials in their rawest form. All of our titanium tube stock, for example, is straight-gauge. If we need to build a butted frame, we butt the raw tubes to suit the order. We achieve three things this way. First, we reduce the amount of inventory we need to keep on hand. Second, we maintain control over the refinement of the materials, so that we’re refining them for their specific rider, rather than just turning out generic tubesets. And third, we maintain a tighter control over the quality of our materials. Smaller lots of tubing are easier to inspect. The best materials make the best bikes. This turns out to be a big deal.
Less inventory also narrows our focus on process and adds a sense of urgency to every build. To succeed with JIT, we need to clearly define each design before we start to build. We need to solve the design challenges in advance, because our system depends on having a very low amount of material waste. Our ability to build the next bike literally depends on getting the bike in front of us right. That’s good pressure, and it produces great bikes.
Streamlining processes and tightening inventory makes US, craft manufacturing possible. This is how you can get a fully-custom, US-made bike for the same price as a high-end, Asian-made production bike (where labor and materials costs are a fraction of our costs). In a world filled with batch-made products, Just-in-Time manufacturing as a way to bring craft-made bikes to market is, for us, a very big idea.