This article assesses the influence of Just in time (JIT) delivery of materials in managing cost levels in the pharmaceutical industry in Kenya. Non - probability sampling technique under the category of purposive sampling was used. The population of interest was composed of twenty three pharmaceutical manufacturing firms located in Nairobi, registered in the Kenya Fact book 16th Edition, 2001 & The Kenya Telephone Directory 2004 and nine pharmaceutical companies , 23 employees in manufacturing, finance, procurement, warehousing were selected out of the target population of 28. The research instrument was a questionnaire. Analysis of the data was done using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .The study affirmed by 63.2% that JIT production strategy and 62.4% respondents affirmed that JIT vendor strategy had a statistically significant association with the cost level management hence the relationship between the variables was not due to chance. The study recommends that pharmaceutical companies in Kenya should fully adopt lean manufacturing in order to manage its cost levels hence give the firm a competitive advantage.
Abdullah, F. M. (2003). Lean Manufacturing Tools and Techniques in the Process Industry with a focus on steel. Pittsburgh.
Besterfield, D. H. (2011). Total Quality Management. New York: Pearson Education, , ISBN 817758412X, 9788177584127 .
Chiarini, A. (2013). Lean Organization: From the tools of the Toyota Production System to lean office, perspective in Business culture 3, DOI.10.1007/978-88-470-2510-3_1. Milan, Italy: Springer-Verlag Italia.
Herron, & Braident, C. (2007). Defining the foundation of lean manufacturing in the context of its origins (Japan). Proceedings of the IET International Conference on Agile Manufacturing,UK, 148-157 United Kingdom.
Jeffrey, L. (2004). The 14 Principles of the Toyota Way: An Executive Summary of the Culture Behind TPS. Michigan: McGraw-Hill.
Shah, & Ward, R. (2003). Lean manufacturing: context, practice bundles, and performance. Journal of Operations Management, 21,, 129-149.
Waithaka, E. N. (2005). Kenya’s Pharmaceutical Industry . Retrieved from www.epzakenya.com/UserFiles/Pharmaceutical%20Sector%20profile: http://www.epzakenya.com/UserFiles/files/Pharmaceutical%20Sector%20profile.
Womack, T. M., Jones, & Roos, J. (2007). The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. New York: Free Press.
Copyright: © 2013 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
