Originally posted by Pål Jensen Pentax have done since the 90's at least. Most of the parts for the camera is manufactured and supplied from the subcontractors within a month of assembly....
But doesn't you stockpile a few month of production at launch so that everybody world wide has enough stock to server the demand?
If you have your own factory, it doesn't make sense to have huge capacity iddling most of the time to do JIT including at product release. You keep a lower capacity, reducing need for employees, real estate and machines and try to optimize your factory capacity.
Sure you don't continue to produce is there no forecast it is needed. You also want to adapt to demand and not stock pile.
But there still a need to accumulate before a launch for cameras... And for lenses the whole business seems based on batch as the sale are very low and there huge economy on scale to produce them in quantity for a short period of time instead of producing a few of each type every day.
JIT is the opposite of basic principle of factory that you do always the same thing in quantity to reduce cost. I am sure there quite few models and strategies to optimize things overall as a tradeof of amount of money invested, reactivity to market, reduce risk of having stock of unsold products as well hability to follow demand... Among other things...