Oh man. I work for an OEM and have almost the same story except the CEO didn't retire so our shelves were never bare. A large part of our sales last year was because our competition couldn't source parts and we could. Also since they have a skeleton engineering crew they couldn't figure out how to improvise (at least this is what our salespeople are claiming).

2022 I spent 3 hours a day, every single working day, just making ECNs for parts out of stock.

Lean JIT is such fucking crap. When a customer line goes down they are bleeding who knows how many millions a day. They want a solution right freaken now. So they call the OEM and we tell them that part that died we have right here on the shelf and we can overnight it.

But you know how you really know that JIT Evengelical types are full of it? Talk to any of them now and they won't say something like "look, normally it works but no one could have predicted this" they will double down on it and say it works but was implement incorrectly. It isnt "true" JIT.

Many years ago I read a sentence that I use every single week of my life "all ideology can do is reassert itself endlessly". When I hear crap like that, how X works if and only if it is true-X I know I am dealing with ideology. When I hear that X works under very specific situations and only gives specific results I know I am dealing with facts. Yes if the customer is never in a rush, there isn't a world shaking event, and you are running out of capacity for storage JIT might be an answer.