Who Invented Just in Time?

JIT's inventor is sometimes subject to debate. For some, Taiichi Ohno; for others, Clarence Saunders, founder of Piggly Wiggly. It could even have been Adam Smith's division of labor or Henry Ford's combination of interchangeable parts and continuous flow. Oddly, few mention Dr. Deming. In my opinion, all of them did. Many people think Dr. Deming had nothing to do with it in an ironic twist. Here's an excerpt from his 1950 Hakone presentation.

"Every month, you must make roughly the right amount of product, or you cannot achieve economical production. If you are left with 10%, or 25%, of your goods unsold, your profits will disappear. Further, if you cannot respond to a large number of orders, you will not maximize your profit. As a result, to achieve economical production, administration of advertising, product design changes pricing, and production."

This is the same message he was giving before World War 2 in his famous Stanford statistic training program as part of the war effort.